II 




mm 

§11 




LOTHROP'S LIBRARY 

OF 

ENTERTAINING HISTORIES 

EDITED BY 

ARTHUR GILMAN M. A. 




THE PANDERON IN THE SIERRA NEVADA. 



SPAIN 



BY 



JAMES A. HARRISON, 

Professor of History and Modern Languages in Washington 
and Lee University. 



How rancli of my young heart, O Spain, 
Went out to thee in days of yore ! 

What dreams romantic filled my brain, 

And summoned back to life again 

The Paladins of Charlemain, 
The Cid Canipeador!" 



>XX< 



OVER ONE HUNDRED ILLUSTRATIONS. 



BOSTON: 
D. LOTH R OP & COMPANY 

FRANKLIN ST., CORNER OF HAWLEY. 






Copyright, 1881, 
By D. Lothrop & Company. 



Press-work by Rockwell <(• Churchill. 



/ 693 



ArV 



PREFATORY NOTE. 



In the preparation of this sketch of the " History of Spain " 
the author has endeavored to use only such authorities as *are 
acknowledged by special students to be the best. The popular 
plan of the series did not admit of exact references, in foot-notes 
or otherwise ; hence the necessity of briefly referring here to the 
sources from which the narrative is drawn. 

Twenty-nine authors have contributed to what has been said in 
the text, making in all between sixty and seventy volumes. Many 
authors, such as Gibbon, Buckle, O'Shea, Borrow, and others, 
have been read, either in full when they referred to Spain, or in 
part on special points connected with the history, and are not 
included in this list. 

For the introductory period the narration is chiefly indebted to 
the Roman Histories of Mommsen and Merivale, Rosseeuw St. 
Hilaire's " Histoire d'Espagne " (vol. i.), and vol. i. of Dunham's 
" History of Spain and Portugal " (5 vols. : Harper, 1872). The 
statistics are taken from Martin's " Statesman's Year-Book " 
(1879), a well-known work, drawn from official Spanish sources. 

In his account of the Gothic period the author has followed 
F. Dahn's "Konige der Germanen, Fiinfte u Sechste Abthei- 
lung " (Wurzburg, 187 1). Dahn is the great authority on the 
subject. Lembke and Schafer's " Geschichte von Spanien " 
(3 vols., 1841-1863) contributed essentially to this part of the 
work, as did also Dr. E. A. Freeman's article on the " Goths " 
in the " Encyclopedia Britannica " (9th ed.). 

The chief authorities on the Mahometan period were Dozy's 
"Histoire des Musulmans d'Espagne" (4 vols., Leyden, 1861), 

V 



vi Prefatory Note. 

Lembke and Schafer's " Geschichte von Spanien" (vols, i., ii., 
and iii.), and Rossceuw St. Hilaire's " Histoire d'Espagne " (vols, 
ii., iii., iv.). Irving's "Life of Mahomet" and Coppee's "Moor- 
ish Conquest of Spain" (2 vols., 1881) furnished some valuable 
hints in connection with this part of the text. The information 
on Moorish architecture and literature was obtained from Lembke 
and Schafer's " Geschichte," Fergusson's " History of Architect- 
ure," Contreras' " Monumentos Arabes " (Seville, 1878), Schack's 
"Kunst und Poesie der Araber in Spanien und Sicilien (2 vols., 
Berlin, 1865), and W. G Palgrave's articles in the "Encyclopedia 
Britannica " (9th ed.) 

For the Cid and his period the "Romancero del Cid " (Leip- 
zig, 187 1 ) and Dozy's important " Recherches sur l'histoire poli- 
tique et litteraire de 1'Espagne pendant le Moyen-Age " (2 vols., 
Leyden, i860) have been followed. 

For the middle period of Christian and Mussulman Spain, 
Lembke and Schafer, Rosseeuw St. Hilaire (vols, iii., iv., v.), and 
Froissart have been followed. 

Prescott's researches on the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, 
and Robertson's and Prescott's on the reign of Charles V., will 
be found to have been especially followed for the period when 
Spain first became a great European power. 

In the chapter on the Spanish Navigators, Irving's " Life of 
Columbus " and the companion volume on the lesser navigators, 
Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico" and "Conquest of Peru" 
(4 vols.), and the article on the Spanish-American colonies in the 
ninth edition of the " Encyclopedia Britannica," have been used. 
As Prescott's conception of the " Empire " of Montezuma is now 
proved to be entirely wrong, the author has endeavored to give 
the results of the most recent research in this department by 
presenting the views of Messrs. A. F. Bandeher and Dr. L. H. 
Morgan (" Social Organization and Mode of Government." " Dis- 
tribution and Tenure of Lands," "Art of War and Mode of War- 
fare " of the Ancient Mexicans ; "Ancient Society ") as a substi- 
tute for Prescott's The work of Dr. G. Briihl on Peru (" Die 
Culturvolker Alt-Amerikas," 1877) has also been consulted. 

Prescott's unfinished " Philip II." and Motley's two invaluable 
Histories cover the period from 1550 to 1600, Llorente's work 



Prefatory Note. vii 

on the " Inquisition " is the main authority for the workings of 
the institution popularly ascribed to St. Dominic. 

For the period reaching from the reign of Philip II. to the 
reign of Isabella II. many works have been consulted, principally 
Rosseeuw St. Hilaire's " Histoire " and Baumgarten's "Geschichte 
Spaniens " (Berlin, 1861), with some help from Dunham and 
others. 

For contemporary Spanish history, Baumgarten, A. W. Lau- 
ser's "Geschichte Spaniens" (2 vols., 1877), and Mazade's "Re- 
volutions de l'Espagne " (1 vol., 1854-6S), have been used. 

Numerous books of travel, Spruner's atlases, and extensive 
personal observation, have contributed to a knowledge of locali- 
ties. 

The maps are reduced from Spruner's ; the translations of 
poems are by Lockbart, Scott, Lord Byron, Bishop Percy, and 
Motley; and the notices of Spanish literature are chiefly given 
on the authority of Ticknor's " History of Spanish Literature " 
(3 vols., 1872). The genealogical tables of the kingdoms of Cas- 
tile and Aragon and the Houses of Habsburg and Bourbon are 
reprinted here from Mr. H. B. George's " Genealogical Tables " 
(last edition, Macmillan, 1875), w ^ tn ^ e kind permission of Mr. 
George and the Delegates of the Clarendon Press. The list of 
Visigothic kings is Dahn's ; the list of sultans was compiled by 
the author from Dozy. 

The special student — if the author can hope for such for his 
imperfect and unpretending work — may notice the absence of all 
reference to the compilations of J. A. Conde, Al-Makkari's "Mu- 
hammadan Dynasties " translated by Gayangos, and Masdeu's and 
La Fuente's Histories of Spain. The omission was intentional, 
and for the reason that Conde's " history" is entirely worthless, 
and the others have been seriously damaged by the criticisms of 
distinguished Oriental and Spanish specialists like R. Dozy. 

While the author cannot hope to have been entirely successful 
in unravelling the many intricacies and complications of Spanish 
history, in setting forth clearly the history and growth of Spanish 
institutions, in tracing without confusion the many separate and 
independent growths within the Peninsula, till all the lines con- 
verge on the vast world-empire of Ferdinand and Isabella, 



viii Prefatory Note. 

Charles V., and Philip II., in contributing to the interest of the 
story by illuminating it here and there with the light of Spanish 
poetry and romance, or in entirely avoiding the dangers of rhetoric 
when tempted by the brilliancy, romantic coloring, and marvel- 
lousness of the "adventure of Spain," he has yet tried to follow 
the authorities conscientiously, has weighed, considered, and com- 
pared much, and presents the results here with all possible diffi- 
dence, and the sincere wish that the following outline may lead its 
readers to further study of so fascinating a suDject. 

In conclusion, the author begs leave to tender his special thanks 
for essential help rendered by Dr. E. A. Freeman, Prof. T. H. 
Ward, and Mr. H. B. George, of Oxford, England, Mr. J\ L. 
Whitney, of the Boston Public Library, whose " Catalogue of the 
Ticknor Collection " of Spanish books, and assistance privately 
rendered, were most welcome, Mr. F. W. Putnam, and Profs. 
Elliott and Adams, of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. 

Lexington, Va., June 17, 1881. 



CONTENTS 



INTRODUCTION. 

Page 

Physical Featukes. — Statistics. — Ancient Spain . xvii 



CHAPTER I. 
Spain under the Visigoths (West Goths) ... 17 

CHAPTER II. 
Spain under the Visigoths (continued) 37 

CHAPTER III. 

The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate ... 54 

CHAPTER IV. 

The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate (continued) 75 

CHAPTER V. 

Spain under the Omaiyades 98 

ix 



x Contents. 

CHAPTER VI. 

Pagk 

Spain under the Omaiyades (continued) . . -117 

CHAPTER VII. 

Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest . . 139 

CHAPTER VIII. 

Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest (con- 
tinued) 163 

CHAPTER IX. 

From the Almoravide Conquest to Ferdinand and 

Isabella 185 

CHAPTER X. 

From the Almoravide Conquest to Ferdinand and 

Isabella (continued) 209 

CHAPTER XI. 
Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella .... 239 

CHAPTER XII. 

Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (continued) . . 255 

CHAPTER XIII. 

Subjugation of the Moors. — Conquest of Granada 271 



Contents. xi 

CHAPTER XIV. 

Page 

Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (continued) . . 312 

CHAPTER XV. 

Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella (continued) . . 329 

CHAPTER XVI. 

The Spanish Navigators 356 

CHAPTER XVII. 

Regency of Ximenes. — Reign of Charles V. and 

Juana .......... 40S 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

Reign of Charles V. and Juana (continued) . . 429 

CHAPTER XIX. 

Spain under Philip II , 455 

CHAPTER XX. 

The Struggle in the Netherlands . 473 

CHAPTER XXL 
Philip's Character and Policy ........ 494 

CHAPTER XXII. 
End of the Reign of Philip II $15 



xii Contents. 

CHAPTER XXIII. 

Page 

From the death of Philip II. to the Accession of 

the Bourbons. — Reigns of Philip III., Philip 
IV., and Charles II 536 

CHAPTER XXIV. 

From the Accession of the Bourbons to the French 
Revolution. — Reigns of Philip V., Ferdinand 
VI., and Charles III 569 

CHAPTER XXV, 

The French Revolution. — Reigns of Charles IV. 

and Ferdinand VII. 6cu 

CHAPTER XXVI, 

Reign of Ferdinand VII. 630 

CHAPTER XXVIL 

The Regency. — Isabella II. — Amadeo. — The Re- 
public — Alfonso XII , 654 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 
Isabella II • ( >Sc 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 



Page 

The Panderon in the Sierra Nevada , . . Frontispiece 

Ancient Aqueduct at Merida .'.'_.. xxv 

Ruins of the Roman Theatre of Murviedro . . xxix 

Ruins of Italica, near Seville .... xxviii 

Destruction of Sagunto ..... xxxvii 

Mao — Kingdom of the West Goths = , . 19 

Interior of Toledo Cathedral .... 25 

King Wamba 47 

A Bull Clearing the Barrier . . . , * 55 

Charro of Salamanca .. = , = . 77 

A Serenata at Cordova . . . . -87 

Ruins of Ancient Theatre of Merida . , - 107 

The Giralda, Seville . . . . . 115 

Court of Lions, Alhambra .... 125 

Exterior of the Mosque of Cordova . . . . 135 

Interior of the Mosque of Cordova . . 143 

Chapel of the Zancarron, Mosque of Cordova . 153 
General View of the Alhambra . . . .161 

Gate of the Torre de las Infantas . „ . .169 

Box of the Cid . . . 

Young Valencians ...... 

The Balcony of Lindaraja ..... 191 

Despoilers of the Azulejos of the Alhambra . . . 203 

The Vase of the Alhambra . . . „ . 211 

Map of Spain and Portugal . . . ' . .219 

Don Pedro el Ceremonious .'..... 224 

Grajal, near Leon . 227 

Binding up the Palm-Leaves . , . 233 



175 
183 



XIV 



List of Illustrations. 



Don Alvaro cle Luna 

Bridge of St. Martin, Toledo 

An Arabian Well, Toledo 

Forest of Palms at Elche 

La Sala de Embajadores, Alcazar, Seville 

Ferdinand and Isabella 

Moorish Arches of the Alcazar, Seville 

Interior of Seville Cathedral 

The Cathedral and Port of Malaga 

Segovia : The Alcazar and Cathedral 

Prison of the Inquisition at Barcelona 

Map — Kingdom of Granada 

An Andalusian Bolera and her Mother 

Cardinal Zimenes 

The Generalife at Granada 

Isabella dictating her Will 

Gate of the Sala de Justicia, Alhambra 

Chart of Sovereigns of Castile 

Chart of Sovereigns of Aragon 

The Sierra de Oca, near Miranda de Ebro 

Banks of the Darro, at Granada 

Peasant of the Environs of Granada . 

Balconies at Granada 

Students Serenading 

Tomb of Ferdinand and Isabella, in Cathedral of 

Landing of Columbus in the New World . 

Ruins of the Castle of Chinchilla 

Gate of the Sun, Toledo 

Salamanca; Town and Roman Bridge. 

Miranda de Ebro . 

Interior of San Juan de los Reyes, Toledo 

Peasant of Alcoy .... 

Charles V. . . . 

Chart — The Habsburgs and Bourbons 

Alcazar of Toledo 

Cattle-Merchant of Cordova 

General View of Madrid 

Portuguese Corrida at Seville : the Pegadores 



Granada 



List of Illustrations. xv 

Page 

An Aged Mendicant and his Grandchild , . 489 

Interior of the Armeria, Madrid .... 495 

Cervantes .... . 498 

Battle of Lepanto ...... 500 

General View of the Escurial .... 1505 

The Noria, or Water- Wheel used in Irrigating . . 511 

Valencian Laborer ...... 517 

Alicante . . . . . ... . 52s 

Peasants in tin- Neighborhood of Madrid . . 533 

The Rock of Gibraltar .... . 539 

Lope de Vega ...... 545 

Jar-Merchant, Madrid .... . 547 

Philip III. ....... 552 

Wandering Musicians ...... 555 

Olivares ...... 557 

Roman Bridge at Ronda ..... 561 

Charles 11. in the Pantheon of the Escorial . . 567 

A Relay at Jaen ...... 573 

Philip V 575 

Charles ML. . . . . . , 579 

Interior of a Country Inn . . . . .581 

The Queen's Avenue, Aranjuez .... 589 

Maria Louisa. . .... 593 

The Leaning Tower of Saragossa .... 597 

In the Church of Our Lady del Pilar, Saragossa . . 605 
Market at Vittoria . . . . . .611 

Balconies of Vittoria ..... 617 

Godoy • • • • • • • 624 

Map. of Navarre ...... 625 

Basque Shepherd, Province of Alava .... 633 

Fountain of the Swan, Madrid . . . . .641 

Basque Peasant ...... 647 

Ferdinand VII. . . . . . . . 650 

Maria Christina .... .65; 

Two Ladies; Sketch made at Alicante . 659 

Heroes of the Carlist Wai ... 663 
The Palacio Real of Madrid . . . .669 

Isabella 11. 675 



xvi List of Illustrations. 

Page 

Cadiz .... : , 677 

Narvaez . . . . . . .681 

Library of the Escurial ...... 683 

The Navaja ....... 687 

Heads of Montpensier, Serrano. Topete . . . 696 

Heads of Ruiz Zonilla, Prim, Sagasta . . . 698 

Heads of Pi y Margall, Castelar . o . 700 



INTRODUCTION. 



PHYSICAL FEATURES. — STATISTICS. — ANCIENT 
SPAIN. 

I^HE physical configuration of Spain has been 
compared with some truth to a truncated pryamid, 
the top of which is reached by successive terraces 
rising one above the other. The desolate plateaus of 
La Mancha and the Castiles crown the summit of the 
pyramid, which is furrowed by many chains of sierras 
towering from six thousand to twelve thousand feet 
above the sea. The noble forests that once clothed the 
mountains and plains have yielded to Spanish ignorance 
or superstition : " They infect the air when they are 
numerous, and attract birds that destroy the harvests 
when they are scattered in the fields," says the peasant. 
Hence the aspect of almost universal poverty in these 
high central plains where the air is as keen as a sword 
in winter, and the summer has a true Syrian heat. Two 
Spanish proverbs sum up all that is to be said about 
the climate of this region ; " At Madrid three months 
hibernal and nine months infernal "; and "the air is so 
thin that it will kill a man and not put out a candle." 
The eastern coast from the Pyrenees to Alicante — 

* K. St. Hilaire's Hist. cPEspagne, vol. I. Dunham's Hist, of 
Spain., vol. I. 

xvii 



xviii Introduction. 

the Mediterranean base of the pyramid — is a paradise, 
and conducts the observer through a landscape of ex- 
quisite fruitfulness, from the olives of France, through 
the orange-embowered hamlets of Catalonia, to the 
Huerta or garden of Valencia, where African vegeta- 
tion is in the ascendant. At Elche, palms in tens of 
thousands group themselves with Oriental suggestive- 
ness around low Moorish houses. 

Catalonia recalls the Cornice road to Genoa ; Valencia 
is a Sicilian landscape ; Andalusia, with its slender 
palms, its cactuses used for hedges, its bananas, cotton, 
and sugar-cane, and its tropical atmosphere so wonder- 
fully pure and brilliant, is entirely African. 

In moral no less than in physical aspects Spain is a 
compound of contrasts.' The character of the inhabi- 
tants of the various provinces differs as sharply as the 
vegetation. The Catalonian is renowned for thrift, in- 
dustry, money getting ; the Galician is the porter and 
water-carrier of Spain ; the keen-witted mountain- 
loving Biscayan stands side by side with the proud 
and tranquil Aragonese ; the bright-tempered Andalu- 
sian sparkling with infinite pleasantry and wit beside 
the grave and careless Catalonian, and the Berber- 
featured Valencian in his cotton drawers. 

Aglance at the map of Spain will explain these differ 
ences. Mountains separate nearly every province from 
its neighbor, and mountains separate the peninsula from 
the rest of Europe. The story of Greece is repeated 
both geographically and historically in Spain. The 
Pyrenees and the sea separate it from Europe and 
Africa: six distinct mountain chains divide up the in- 
terior. As against the outside world it is a unit ; as 



Introduction. xix 

against itself, it is a loose aggregation of jarring and 
inharmonious elements which for ages has had no con- 
sciousness of nationality. 

The mountain chains are the Pyrenean chain, about 
ten thousand feet high, in the north ; the Iberian 
chain, twining through the heart of the country east- 
ward and southward to the Sierra Morena, filled with 
enormous masses of fossil bones and forming the 
starting point of the Tagus, on one side, and the 
Gabriel, Guadalaviar, and Xucar, on the other; the 
Carpetanian group, running north-east and south-west, 
with the royal chateaux of the Escurial and La Granja 
clinging to its granite declivities, and ending in Portugal ; 
the Lusitanian chain {Mous Herminius of the Romans) 
traversing Portugal, and separating the Tagus from the 
Guadiana ; the Sierra Morena, " a plateau on one side 
and a mountain on the other," clothed in rosemary, 
thyme, cystus, lentisc, and arbutus on one side, and with 
date-palms, aloes, and vines on the other ; and the Sierra 
Nevada, the snowy chain of Andalusia, the loftiest of 
the peninsula, — probably a continuation of the Atlas 
chain, — springing out of smiling vegas, and rising in a 
series of dazzling summits to a height from ten thou- 
sand to twelve thousand feet above the sea. 

The four sides of the pyramid, by a sort of orienta- 
tion, thus front the four points of the compass. On the 
north is the humid, chilly, verdurous region of Canta- 
bria, where the vine will hardly grow, and wine is 
replaced by cider — "the Normandy of the Peninsula." 
The Portuguese slope is far from having so distinct a 
physiognomy, and is clothed in fine chestnut, sweet- 
acorned oak, olive, and vine. The Andalusian and 



xx Introduction. 

southern reflect, in vegetation and physical peculiarities, 
the opposite coast. The eastern or Iberian, slope, from 
Cape Gata to Cape Cruz, is the garden and glory of 
Spain. 

Five great rivers, — the Ebro, the Duero, the Tagus, 
the Guadiana, and the Guadalquivir ; and five smaller 
ones, — Guadalaviar, Xucar, Segura, Minho, Mondego ; 
intersect the country. A large number of salt lakes is 
found, especially in Catalonia and Aragon. Over two 
thousand mineral springs are to be seen in various parts 
of the country. Traces of volcanoes, thermal waters, 
and lava-currents attest a lively volcanic activity, in 
former times, which culminated in 1755 in the great 
earthquake of Lisbon. Buckle * attributes the gradually 
developing superstition of the Spaniards largely to the re- 
flex action of these and similar physical phenomena. 

Marble of many colors and great beauty, rock salt 
and sea salt, mercury from the celebrated mine of 
Almaden in La Mancha, iron from Biscay, silver 
from Andalusia, copper, loadstone, gold, pearls and 
rubies, from various provinces, coal, and oil-wells, 
make of Spain what it was in antiquity, an inexhaustible 
storehouse of wealth, now, indeed, but poorly utilized. 

The peculiar wealth of the country, lies in its flocks 
and herds. Millions of acres of land are abandoned 
to the shepherds and their migratory hordes, which for- 
merly ravaged the country more pitilessly than the 
Vandals and in their wanderings from province to 
province were more dreaded than the robbers themselves. 
A single great company in the 16th century employed 
from forty thousand to sixty thousand shepherds and 
owned seven millions of sheep. The wandering flocks are 

* Hist. C/7'. Essay on Spain. 



Introduction. xxi 

distributed in bands of ten thousand, under fifty shep- 
herds, with fifty dogs, and rove from place to place, 
though subject to certain laws and restrictions. It is 
said that when they come to a cultivated field they have 
the right to break a way through it, narrowing their 
passage as much as possible, but of course ruthlessly 
trampling under foot all that they do not devour. 

The Andalusian horses are famous for their gait, 
swiftness, and fire ; the Spanish bulls are equally cele- 
brated for blood and spirit. The bull-fight is of unknown 
antiquity, and, as a national sport, perhaps, is more 
fiercely applauded and passionately loved now than ever. 
One of the scourges of the country is found in the 
countless locusts, wafted by the wind in such multi- 
tudes that the air is darkened. Their touch is fatal to 
nearly every vegetable thing with which they come in 
contact. 

The population of the country has been almost 
stationary for a long time. The Moorish wars, the ex- 
pulsion of the Jews in the fifteenth century and of the 
Moriscoes in the seventeenth, the emigration to the 
New World, and the grinding imposts, misery, and idle- 
ness of every kind, have all but paralyzed the resources 
of the nation. 

At the last general census of i860* the population of 
Spain, embracing the Balearic and Canary islands, was 
sixteen million three hundred and one thousand, eight 
hundred and fifty-one. The area covered is one hundred 
and eighty-two thousand seven hundred and fifty-eight 
English square miles. In 1874 only four of the Span- 
ish cities contained over one hundred thousand inhab- 
itants : 

*,Martin's Yearbook for i8yg % Art. Spain. 



xxii Introduction. 

Madrid, 367,284, Barcelona, 215,965, 

Valencia, 153,457, Seville, 118,878. 

Malaga, Mnrcia, Saragossa, Granada, Cadiz, and 
Valladolid, all fall beneath this estimate. Forty-six 
per cent, of the kingdom is uncultivated. The total 
imports in 1868-1877 averaged eighty million dollais; 
exports, sixty million dollars. The merchant navy in 

1877 numbered two thousand nine hundred and fifteen 
vessels — a falling off of three thousand six hundred 
vessels since i860. The length of railways in 1877 
was three thousand six hundred and seventy-three Eng- 
lish miles, with one thousand two hundred and sixty- 
four English miles in construction. These railways are 
owned by private companies, with, mostly, subventions 
or guarantees from government. The length of tele- 
graph lines in January, 1877, was eight thousand five 
hundred and eighty-three English miles, and of wires, 
twenty thousand six hundred and twenty English miles. 
The National debt in June, 1877, was twenty-seven hun- 
dred millions of dollars. Actual strength of the army in 

1878 was one hundred and fifty-one thousand six hundred 
and sixty-eight, including infantry, artillery, engineers, 
cavalry, provincial bodies, carbineers, and guardia civil. 
The navy had nine thousand five hundred and seventy 
sailors and five thousand five hundred marines, with 
one captain-general of the fleet, twenty admirals, and 
three hundred and seventy-eight commissioned officers 
of various grades. It is recruited, by conscription in 
the naval districts along the coast. The army is of- 
ficered by sixty lieutenants-general, one hundred and 
thirty-one major-generals, and two hundred and thirty- 
eight brigadier-generals ; and it is composed (1) of a 



Introduction. xxiii 

permanent army j (2) a first, or active reserve ; (3) a 
second, or sedentary reserve, the scheme for which 
was not fully developed in 1878. 

Cuba, Porto Rico, the Philippine, and a few Atlantic 
and Indian islands, comprise the colonial possessions 
of Spain. The American possessions (Cuba, Porto 
Rico) embrace an area of forty six thousand seven 
hundred and seventy square miles ; population two 
million sixty thousand eight hundred and seventy ; 
Asiatic possessions (Philippines, Caroline, and Marian 
Islands, and Palaos) sixty-six thousand four hundred 
and twenty-five square miles ; population four million 
three hundred and fifty-two thousand eight hundred 
and seventy-nine ; African possessions (Fernado do Po 
and Annabon) four hundred and eighty-three square 
miles, population five thousand five hundred and 
ninety. Total square miles, one hundred and thirteen 
thousand six hundred and seventy-eight ; total popula- 
tion, six million four hundred and nineteen thousand 
three hundred and thirty-nine.* Slavery, abolished in 
Porto Rico in 1873, still exists in Cuba. The number 
of slaves in Cuba (1876) was one hundred and ninety- 
nine thousand. 



Celts, Iberians, Phenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, 
Romans, Suevi, Vandals, and Arabs have all left traces 
of themselves in Spain. Strabof tells us nearly all that 
we know of ancient Spain before and after the Roman 
conquest. According to him the Iberians seem to 
have been the primitive inhabitants of the country, 
whose eastern part they occupied. The Celts, the 

* Lanser, Geschichte Spaniens, vol. II. pp. 257-321. 
t Hispania, 3, 136-176, et al. 



xxiv Introduction. 

"men of the forests," at an uncertain date invaded the 
domain of these " men of the river " (Iberi, Ebro). 
Long struggles ensued, which ended in a final reconcil- 
iation and a mingling of the two races in the Celtib'erian 
nation. The Iberian element however seems to have 
preponderated, though the Celts, as usual, gave their 
names to many places. It is believed with some show 
of truth that the modern Basques, and their as yet un- 
classified language, are descendants of the Iberians. 
The Celtic tribes seem to have embraced the Cantabri- 
ans, Asturians, Vascones, Galicians, and Lusitanians. 
The Iberians were more numerous, and extended from 
Gibraltar through parts of Andalusia, Valencia, Murcia, 
and Aragon, to the Pyrenees. The blended race of 
Celtiberians dwelt in the centre of the peninsula, on the 
border-land between the two nations. 

As, however, the whole subject is one swarming with 
uncertainties, surmises, doubtful passages in ancient 
writers, and conclusions drawn by Diodorus and Strabo 
from a state of things prevailing in the peninsula after 
the Phenician, Carthaginian, and Roman conquests had 
passed over the land, it will be best at once to avoid 
confusing the reader by reference to unproved state- 
ments, and to approach a period when the light is not 
quite so faint. 

The Phenician navigators seem to have been attracted 
by the beauty and wealth of the coast, where they 
formed settlements here and there. The legendary 
Tyrian Hercules founded Cadiz. The rich metallifer- 
ous basin of the Guadalquivir seems to have had an 
early attraction for them, and a temple of Hercules 
erected on the Isle of Santi Petri, is said to have sig- 
nalized one of their settlements. The founding of 



Introduction. xxvii 

Cadiz, Malaga, Cordova, Seville, and many other im- 
portant towns was attributed to them, and " Hercules " 
has been well called the collective name under which a 
grateful after-generation incarnated the most illustrious 
of these far-away Phenician navigators who braved un- 
known seas in their great exploring expeditions and 
left cities behind them as monuments of their presence. 

The Rhodian Greeks founded a colony in Catalonia 
about 900 B. C, and are thought to have settled the 
Balearic Isles ; the Zantiotes and Phocaeans have con- 
nected their names traditionally with Saguntum and 
Emporion as the Phocaeans did with Marseilles ; and 
Greek names are found in the southwest and north of 
Spain. The worship of Diana more especially was a 
legendary accompaniment of these migrations and set- 
tlements. 

The real history of Carthaginian Spain, apart from 
the restlessness of a purely speculative school of his- 
tory eager to theorize where there are no facts, begins 
three centuries before Christ, with the arrival of the 
Barca faction in Baetica (Andalusia). Three hundred 
years before, the wealth of Cadiz having excited the 
envy of the aborigines, its Phenician citizens, to pro- 
tect themselves, called in the aid of Carthage and the 
Xumidians, who soon overran much of the country and 
made it a dependency of the great south Mediter- 
ranean city. 

In 237 p.. c. Hamilcar Barca landed at Cadiz with a 
large army, after having conquered the whole African 
coast as far as the ocean. In nine years he had over- 
come the west and south of Spain, but the confeder- 
ated chiefs of the Vettones succeeded in defeating him, 



xxviii Introduction. 

and he was drowned in the passage of the Guadiana. 
Hasdrubal, his son-in-law, with a rare union of vigor 
and humanity, soon greatly extended the dominion of 
the Carthaginians with his fifty-six thousand men and 
two hundred elephants. He built the city of Carthage 
Nova (Carthagena), which became a great commercial, 
maritime, and military outpost, full of fortifications and 
arsenals. The frightened Greek colonies implored the 
aid of the Roman senate against the Carthaginian 
power ; a treaty stipulated the independence of these 
colonies and fixed a limit to the growing Carthaginian 
empire ; but Hasdrubal, feeling himself strong in the 
affections of the people and finding himself firmly in- 
trenched at Carthagena, resolved to break the treaty, 
and would have done so, had not the dagger of an 
assassin put an end to his life. 

Hannibal, the son of Hamilcar, a young man of 
twenty-five, was chosen by the army to succeed Has- 
drubal ; and now he saw a chance to show at last the 
eternal hate which his father had made him swear 
against the Romans. The admirable portrait left by 
Livy* is a pregnant individualization of one of the great 
men of antiquity. In the same lucid and impassioned 
pages the memorable story of the siege of Saguntum.t 
the ally and funeral offering of Rome to the vengeance 
of the Carthaginians, still glows with eloquence after 
the lapse of twenty centuries. A cry of grief rever- 
berated through antiquity and found an echo in many 
historians over this perfidious immolation of a devoted 
friend on the part of Rome ; " Ditvi Romae consulitur. 
Saguntum expugnatur" was the scathing proverb that 

* Liv. lib. 21, 22, 2:] ? 24 et sqq. t Ibid, 21 et s<j<j. 



Introduction. xxxi 

embalmed the memory of this humiliating incident at 
Rome. 

The great struggle between Rome and Carthage had 
now begun. During the second Punic war, in 218, 
Cneius Scipio came over to Spain, and soon got pos- 
session of the eastern coast from Carthagena to the 
Pyrenees; but in 211 he perished, having been pre- 
ceded by his brother Publius, who underwent the 
same fate, together with his army. In the brilliant and 
moving pages of Plutarch, their successor, Publius Cor- 
nelius Scipio (210), is seen landing in Spain with 
eleven thousand men, capturing Carthagena, with im- 
mense booty, gaining all hearts by his politic magna- 
nimity, conquering Cadiz, founding Italica near Seville, 
and dividing the country into two great provinces, 
Hither and Further Spain. Cato was sent thither as 
consul in 195, and that system of minute and merciless 
plundering was inaugurated by which Spain, the first 
and richest of all the great Roman colonies, was trans- 
formed into the market-garden of Rome. 

The splendid revolt of Viriates, the shepherd-chief- 
tain of the Lusitanians, who for more than eight years 
(140-148) defied the whole power of Rome, showed, 
even more than the innumerable rebellions and out- 
breaks from decade to decade, how difficult it was to 
break the free and spirited population to a foreign 
yoke. Numantia, equally a Celtiberian city, resisted 
with the energy of despair the encroachments of Rome, 
and only fell before sixty thousand men and Scipio 
yEmilianus, another of that remarkable family whose 
names are so gloriously and dismally connected with 
the subjugation of Spain. Saguntum, Numantia, and 



xxxii Introduction. 

Saragossa — three sieges of world-wide celebrity — tes- 
tify of that impassioned strength and fortitude which, 
in religion as in war, two thousand years ago as now, 
have always formed the foundation of the Spanish 
character. 

The revolt of Sertorius, a Roman exile dreaming of 
independent sovereignty in Spain, occurred twenty 
years after the siege of Numantia and was crushed by 
Pompey and Metellus after eight years of furious and 
difficult encounter (71). His portrait hangs in that 
beautiful gallery which Plutarch * has so richly hung 
with discrowned kings, disappointed ambitions, noble 
and desperate enterprises, and the jDathos of useless 
death and failure. 

The most remarkable of all the quarrels espoused 
by the Peninsula was that of Pompey and Caesar. 
Caesar triumphed, and has left a record of the contest 
in his inimitable commentaries.! Under Augustus, 
Spain was declared a perpetual tributary of the em- 
pire and for the first time, after two hundred years of 
sanguinary combat, the dominion of Rome showed 
itself beneficent and tolerable. A regular administra- 
tion was introduced ; the country, to facilitate its con- 
trol and organization, was divided into three provinces 
(Baetica, Tarraconensis, and Lusitania) ; wise and 
humane laws were established, protecting the inhab- 
itants ; magnificent roads, bridges, and aqueducts were 
built ; and grateful altars smoked in honor of the father 
and liberator of Spain. 

Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant, said Tacitus, 

* Tlut. II. 277-300. 

t Caes. Bell. Hispaiiiense. De liello Civili. 



fJAf. 



riifff 



WHMr ' 'llllf lliiii 











I li 



■r 



lis 



■ip 



Introduction. xxxv 

painting with a characteristic stroke the policy of most 
of the Roman conquerors. Tiberias, to whom altars 
burned and whom medals immortalized, exemplified in 
Spain the epigram of the great historian. Caligula, 
Nero, Galba, and Otho, caressed or spurned the penin- 
sula according to the needs of the moment Under 
Vespasian the persecution of the Jews broke out, and a 
colony of the wretched exiles was planted in Spain and 
settled at Merida : the fountain of that swarming race 
which afterward filled the history of the country with 
their intrigues, miseries, and oppressions. 

Trajan and Hadrian were both Spaniards, born at 
Italic?, and were both loved and honored by the peo- 
ple for the well-being and tranquillity enjoyed by the 
land under their vigorous but appreciative administra- 
tion. Antoninus and Marcus Aurelius (sprung from a 
noble Spanish family sojourning at Rome) gave Spain 
the happiness that needed no history • and under them 
it reached the culminating point, after which there is a 
continual decline. A band of Suevi crossed the Pyre- 
nees in 270 A. D. and ravaged the provinces for some 
time. The reigns of Diocletian and Constantine were 
important to Spain, more particularly from a religious 
point of view. Crushed by imposts, stripped of its 
communal rights, devoured by the thousand fiscal 
agents of the new Rome of the Bosphorus, its social 
system dissolved, its magistrates became almost univer- 
sally corrupt, and it took refuge, as a last resource, in 
the arms of the clergy. 

Christianity seems to have penetrated into Spain 
about the time of Nero. The Spaniards attribute its 
introduction to Saint James the greater (Santiago). 



xxxvi Introduction. 

Originally persecuted by the polytheists, the new relig- 
ion increased step by step until it took its seat on the 
imperial throne in the person of Constantine. The 
council of Illiberis in Spain, held about 306, is claimed 
to be the earliest great western church council on 
record, and here were fixed, after the fashion of an 
austere orthodoxy, the rites, ceremonies, and dogmas 
of the Spanish church, nearly a quarter of a century 
before the council of Nice (325). Constantine had 
divided Spain into seven provinces (Lusitania, Baetica, 
Galicia, Carthaginiensis, Tarraconensis, the Balearic 
Isles, and Tingitania on the African coast), and with 
these the ecclesiastical provinces corresponded. The 
bishops dwelling in the capitals of these provinces — 
Merida, Seville, Bracara, Carthagena, Saragossa, Palma, 
and Tangier — took the name of metropolitans. Of 
these the metropolitan of Toledo, — substituted for 
Carthagena, — owing to the fact that the celebrated 
parliament-councils were held there, gradually assumed 
the pre-eminence, and at length acquired the primacy 
of Spain. The heresies of Arianism and Priscillian- 
ism — the former introduced by the Gothic conquest, 
the latter by an eloquent and voluptuous Spanish 
priest — agitated the country until Priscillian was put 
to death (384) and the Goths embraced Catholicism 
under Recared. 

Constantine initiated a uniform administration for 
his whole vast empire. Spain and Gaul formed one of 
the four divisions into which the immense agglomera- 
tion fell. The twenty-five military colonies, formed of 
citizens and soldiers who enjoyed on foreign soil all 
the rights of the mother country, kept Spain in sub- 



Introduction. xxxix 

jection during the imperial period ; forty-nine municipia, 
with privilege of self-government, came next in order 
among the graduated cities ; then the cities of the 
Latin law, peopled by families from Latium, who, 
without the right of Roman citizenship, could acquire 
this right after they had held certain magistracies ; 
then the six free cities (immunes), having their own 
laws and magistrates, and exempt from the usual im- 
perial burdens ; and, last, the allied cities, and the 
tributary cities (stipendiaries), which were heavily bur- 
dened with the task of feeding Rome and furnish- 
ing supplies for carrying on the government. A throng 
of petty communal republics however, soon arose, — 
always a characteristic feature of Spanish administra- 
tive life, — and, by paying the regular imposts, were left 
free to govern themselves. Under Antoninus all the 
subjects of the empire were proclaimed Roman 
citizens. 

Elegant vestiges of antiquity, chiefly utilitarian, still 
show the blossoming of art in Spain under the empire. 
The ruins of the palace of Augustus at Tarragona ; 
the arch of Bara raised by Trajan ■ the splendid 
bridge of Alcantara, believed by the Arabs to have 
been raised by the genies ; the less celebrated bridges 
of. Evora, Calatrava, and Salamanca ; the aqueducts of 
Seville, Tarragona, and Evora, and the stupendous 
aqueduct-bridge one hundred feet high at Segovia ; the 
wonderfully preserved theatre of Saguntum ; the 
famous mosaic of Italica ; and the baths, porticoes, and 
ruins of many sorts, attest the grandeur of the Roman 
civilization. The country was furrowed by unequalled 
roads, some of which still exist. Spain, even to-day, is 



x * Introduction. 

full of reminiscences of the grandiose scenic displays 
of ancient times, combats of gladiators, chariot-races, 
gymnasiums, amphitheatres, bull-fights ; and we are told 
of Diodes, the Lusitanian charioteer, who was victori- 
ous two thousand five hundred and twenty-six times in 
the races. 

A noble literary efflorescence revived in Spain the 
waning lustre of Roman intellectual life. Cicero's 
fastidious ear might revolt at the thick accent of the 
Cordovan Latin, but posterity can but do honor to the 
illustrious works of Seneca, Lucan, Martial, Quintilian, 
Pomponius Mela, Silius Italicus, Florus, and Columella! 
Many of these may, as a critic suggests, contain the 
germs of that affectation which is so perfectly revealed 
in the modern term concetti— a quaint, prankish, epi- 
grammatic, whimsically brilliant elaboration of thought 
and imagery into dainty pictures, like a carving on & an 
antique gem, unknown to the simple and frank elegance 
of the writers of the Golden Age ; but in this there is 
nothing to notice except the inevitable transition from 
ancient to modern life, nothing to regret save that our 
libraries are too scantily supplied with the musical 
cadences, the lascivce pagince, of the Poetce minores. 



SPAIN. 

CHAPTER I. 
SPAIN UNDER THE VISIGOTHS (West Goths). 

THE history of the Visigoths, before their separa- 
tion from the Ostrogoths, is involved in obscurity. 
Divided into a multitude of groups, each ruled by its own 
petty chief, we find them about a. d. 350, acknowledg- 
ing the overlordship of the East-Gothic king Ermanaric, 
of the house of the Amali, though a hundred years be- 
fore they had become virtually independent of the 
Ostrogothic king. 

Athanaric (a. d. 366-381) is the first well authen- 
ticated ruler of most of these multitudinous groups ; 
and as he succeeded his father Rothestes in the same 
position, we get a glimpse of a state of things closely 
approximating an hereditary rulership. We find him 
fighting vigorously against Frithigern, another great 
chieftain \ and a few years later the attack of the Huns 
takes place — a horde of Mongol barbarians, who, 
sweeping down from their Asiatic habitations, gave the 
finishing blow to the tottering Roman Empire, by forc- 
ing over its frontiers that source of all its miseries — 
the scarcely more civilized Germans. For three hun- 
dred years these fierce, blond-haired, ruddy-cheeked 

J 7 



18 • Spain under the Visigoths. 

savages had lingered on the outskirts of the empire, 
along the lower Danube, menacing it with destruction ; 
and now fleeing in terror before the Huns, they crossed 
the Danube and sought the protection of the huge or- 
ganization over which the Emperor Valens ruled. 

It is a picturesque glimpse that we first get of the 
Huns, swimming their horses by moonlight over the 
Dniester, outwitting Athanaric, and sending a tremor 
through the whole reverberating empire. The Visigoths 
saw their only salvation from Rome : accordingly, in 376 
more than two hundred thousand fighters crossed the 
Danube, and being assigned to Thrace, as a habitation, 
were constituted by Valens a bulwark against the for- 
midable Huns. 

The Romans, who hated and dreaded the countless 
starvelings who had now taken up their abode within 
the empire, exercised their rapacious tendencies by 
wringing from them all they possessed, even their wives, 
children, and slaves. Their situation soon became in- 
tolerable, and bloody outbursts followed, in which 
Frithigern, taking the lead, and assisted by Goths, Huns, 
Alans — fugitives, mountaineers, revolutionists of every 
color — succeeded in annihilating Valens and the 
Roman army, at the great battle of Adrianople in 378 — 
" a second Cannae," looked upon as a punishment for 
the Arianism of the emperor. 

Athanaric mysteriously withdrew, as it appears, and 
left behind the commanding figure of Frithigern to ar- 
range with Theodosius the Great a basis upon which 
these antagonistic nationalities could live together. 
His death in 379-80 left the Visigoths again under the 
control of Athanaric, who concluded with Theodosius 



Alaric the Balth. 21 

peace and alliance — the Goths were now called 
foederati — was treated by the emperor with extraordi- 
nary honors, and at his death, we are naively in- 
formed, was distinguished by a royal funeral and a 
mortuary column. 

The former hostile attitude of Athanaric and his 
Visigoths had suddenly given way before a conscious- 
ness of the superior culture and civilization of the 
Romans ; instead of combating, they now sought 
Roman supremacy, and in return for peace and protec- 
tion began to acknowledge the obligation to bear arms 
in defence of their protectors. " The emperor was God 
upon earth," said Athanaric, :i and he who resisted him 
would have his blood on his own head." 

Remaining for a time leaderless, a vast and loosely- 
organized confederation governed by counts, dukes, and 
chieftains, the Goths suddenly crystalized around the 
heroic person of Alaric the Balth, who summed up in 
himself all that the Goths held dearest, — unbounded 
freedom, courage, — that is the meaning of Balth, — and 
splendid military gifts. Born about 370-75, of noble 
Visigothic blood, his name soon became enclustered 
by legends and enveloped in a maze of fiction. 

The death of Theodosius, " the friend of the Gothic 
nation," left his successor in a peculiarly difficult posi- 
tion. The " Scythians " — the " sheepskin-wearing sav- 
ages," as the Goths were called, — regarded with hate, 
fear, and contempt by their allies, treated with violence 
and injustice at every point, egged to desperation by 
political and race antipathies — lay like a huge thun- 
der-cloud along the Thracian settlements, waiting the 
moment and the man under whose influence they should 



22 Spain under the Visigoths. 

redress their long-smouldering wrongs and recover their 
independence. Both were found in AFaric soon after 
the death of Theodosius. 

" Peace with walls," cried he, as, avoiding fortified 
places, his clouds of rugged Teutons swept down 
through the flat lands of the neighboring provinces, 
overran Macedonia, Thessaly, Arcadia, Illyria, to the 
heart of Greece and Peloponnesus. Escaping from 
Stilicho, the general of Honorius, Emperor of the 
West, probably by the treachery of his opponent, Alaric 
hurried to Byzantium, armed his people out of the im- 
perial magazines, watched, manipulated, menaced both 
empires, and at length, allured by the opulence of the 
Western Empire, broke into Italy in the year 400. 
There is a striking legend that the king was driven in- 
cessantly and against his will, by demoniac force, 
against Rome. " Rumpe omnes, Alarice, mo7-as" 
whispered the tempter in the verses of Claudian ; and 
we are told that Rome trembled and strengthened her 
ancient walls. Receiving a check from Stilicho at Pol- 
lentia, in 402, he escaped again into Illyria. Roman 
exultation over the corpses that covered the field of 
Pollentia was of short duration, for Alaric in 408, again 
penetrated into Italy, advanced to the very gates of 
Rome, and at first demanding all the gold and silver in 
the town, together with the liberation of all slaves of 
" barbarian " blood, went off to Tuscany content, with 
five thousand pounds of gold, thirty thousand pounds 
of silver, four thousand silken and three thousand purple 
garments, and three thousand pounds of spices. The 
wretched Honorius, the " Christipotens Juvenis " of Pru- 
dentius, lay walled up in Ravenna, helpless and humili- 
ated. 



Alaric sacks Rome. 23 

Restlessly seeking a settlement south of the Alps, 
somewhere in the beautiful plains of Italy, and as con- 
tinually thwarted by Honorius, the warlike Balth, 
scorning the insults of the Romans, — " learn the fear of 
Rome, idiotic world of barbarians ! " — again marched 
to Rome and forced the senate, by threats of storming or 
starvation, to depose Honorius and elevate Attalus to 
the imperial throne. It is probable that Alaric did not 
have himself proclaimed emperor because of the gulf 
existing between the two nationalities, their fundamen- 
tal differences of conception and polity, and from the 
fact that as king of the Germans he had the power to 
command a free people, which, as emperor of the Ro- 
mans, he would have lost. A genuine German king 
needed no confirmation of his right to rule his people ; 
he was no " barbarian adventurer, clad in Roman 
purple," ascending from dignity to dignity till he had 
attained the highest. Alaric, therefore, was guilty of 
no act of renunciation in avoiding the throne. He fol- 
lowed an ancient German custom, in preferring lawful 
rule over his own people to dangerous usurpation of the 
rights of others. 

Finding Ravenna not to be taken, Alaric sacked 
Rome, though not so frightfully as the rhetoricians of his 
and later days are fond of representing to us. " Cum 
Romanis gessi bellum, non cum apostolis Dei" is the le- 
gend that characterizes Alaric's conduct during the 
great event. Passing south into Campania, on his way 
to Africa, — the granary of Rome and Italy, — his ships 
were scattered by a storm in the strait of Messina. 
According to the legend of Olympiodorus, a statue pre- 
vented the barbarian from crossing to Sicily, "the 

25-6 Illus 



24 Spain under the Visigoths. 

ancient bridge between Italy and Africa ; " and we have 
stories of flying Romans pursued from' island to island 
by Goths on swimming horses. 

In the prime of life Alaric died, — the only invader 
since Hannibal who had penetrated so far south, — and 
was buried after ancient Germanic custom — witness 
the singularly beautiful " Passing of Scyld " in the 
great Anglo-Saxon poem * — in the waves. He was 
succeeded by his wife's brother, Athaulf (410-415), 
who, passing with his followers from Italy to Gaul, over- 
ran a part of that country in the south, married Pla- 
cidia, the captive sister of Honorius, held by him as a 
hostage, and attempted a reconciliation with the em- 
peror of the west. Famine forced him to seek relief 
by passing the Pyrenees into Spain, where he occupied 
Barcelona. The pathetic hungering for a home, which 
accompanies all these ceaseless migrations of the 
early Germans, seemed now on the point of being 
gratified. But the death of Athaulf and the murder 
of his successor, the usurper Sigric, a week after (415), 
for a moment thwarted this now rooted determination. 

Wallia (415-419), who was related to neither of the 
preceding kings, was elected to succeed Sigric, and 
after attempting to rid Spain, in the interests of the 
emperor, of the barbarian vermin with which it swarmed, 
— Suevi, Alani, and Vandals, — passed over into the 
Roman province of Aquitania Secunda (418), on the 
other side of the Pyrenees, and received by treaty 
with Rome the magnificent river country of the Ga- 
ronne, from Toulouse to the ocean. Populous cities 
abounded in this voluptuous region, — Bordeaux, Agen, 
Angouleme, Poitiers, and Toulouse, — and at last there 

*Heyne, Beovulf, i. 20-52. 




INTERIOR OF TOLEDO CATHEDRAL. 



Attila the Hun. 27 

seemed a resting-place found for this wandering race. 
The "luxurious land of the golden Garonne," the 
" pearl of Gaul," as it was called, — an inimitable 
domain, which was a tangled wilderness of wine, and 
burnished harvest-fields, and orchards, where glad songs 
were chanted under the myrtles and plane trees, spark- 
ling fountains bedewed the gardens, and gliding rivers 
multiplied the fertility of the soil infinitely, — became 
the possession of the Visigoths for nearly a century ; 
and here was founded that kingdom of Toulouse (419- 
507), which formed the stepping-stone between Frank- 
ish Gaul and the great Visigothic monarchy in the 
Iberian peninsula. 

Wallia died in the first year after the return from 
Spain (419), and was followed by Theoderic I. (419- 
451), who was elected by popular choice, as was usual 
with the Germanic nations, and had no family relation- 
ship with his predecessor. 

It was during this reign that the movement of Attila, 
king of the Huns, against the western empire, took 
place, and that the efforts of " the scourge of God " to 
separate Romans and Visigoths, or play these races 
skilfully against each other for his own purposes, were 
brought to overwhelming defeat at Chalons (451), by 
Aetius, the Roman general, and the aged Theoderic. 
The latter died, fighting gloriously on the field of 
battle. 

Thorismund, his eldest (?) son, was raised by popular 
acclaim on the spot to succeed his father ; but he was 
shortly afterward murdered by his brothers, Theoderic 
and Fridric (453). Theoderic II. reigned from 453 
to 466, when he " paid as he deserved," in the simple 



28 Spain under the Visigoths. 

verdict of the historian. He fell a victim to the ambi- 
tion of his brilliant and powerful brother Euric, whose 
eighteen years' reign greatly extended the Gothic power 
in Gaul and Spain, who cast off the supremacy of 
Rome, and lifted the people from a feeble to a com- 
manding position by his bold, shrewd, and inflexible 
policy. An admirable statesman as well as an intrepid 
conqueror, he knew how to draw profit from pre-exist- 
ing relations with Rome, from the cultivated provincial 
Roman nobility, from Celts and Suevi, He ravaged 
the plains of the south of France so terribly that the 
stags came to wander in herds through the streets of 
Vienne, while the Roman aristocracy of the country re- 
solved, in case of extremity, to emigrate or to enter the 
ministry, — "to leave their homes or their hair," as 
Apollinaris Sidonius quaintly expressed it. 

Euric's efforts were crowned with success, and soon 
the Goths held the whole domain bounded by the two 
seas, the Rhone, and the Garonne. In 461 there was 
no longer any Roman army in Spain to oppose the 
complete disintegration of that vast Roman province ; 
gradually all the larger towns had been taken from the 
Suevi and the Roman provincials, until soon the Goths 
occupied the entire peninsula with the exception of a 
narrow strip in the extreme northwest, where the Suevi 
maintained themselves among the inaccessible sierras 
of Galicia. 

Euric became so powerful that it is said his palace 
swarmed with ambassadors from the Saxons, Franks, 
Heruli, Burgundians, Romans, and Persians, seeking 
his alliance. He was the mightiest prince of the Occi- 
dent, and his name " struck terror into the hearts of the 



Clovis the Frank. 29 

people beyond the sea." The western empire was at 
its last gasp, and the Ostrogoths and Franks had not 
yet risen to importance upon its ruins. An enthusi- 
astic Arian, like most of his race, the " word Catholic 
distorted his face and heart like vinegar," says a 
Roman rhetorician of Euric ; hence the obstinate and 
dangerous opposition of the Catholic bishops which 
threatened his life and ended in the destruction of his 
great work of conquest, consolidation, and reform. 
He died in his bed in 485, happily before the treason 
of the Catholic clergy, and the sympathy of the Catho- 
lic laity, had lost nearly the whole of Gothic Gaul to 
the Franks, under his son and successor, Alaric II. 

(485-507)- 

The Franks, destined of all the German tribes to the 
noblest future, were now governed by the youthful 
Clovis, an impersonation, as he has been truly called, 
of all the national Frankish qualities. He possessed 
great rapidity of insight, profound knowledge of his 
enemy's weak points, swiftness in action, and a nerve 
that quailed before no enormity. A pagan fatalist, he 
was almost uninterruptedly lucky, heading a numerous 
and skilfully-trained people, in a country singularly 
well situated for the foundation of a great empire : yet a 
Catholic, gathering about him an unexampled force of 
natural and national, political and ecclesiastical advan- 
tages, neither the effeminate civilization of the south, 
nor the heathen and Arians in the east and west, could 
avail against his vigor. Besides this, all Gaul longed 
to get rid of the Goths. Clovis proclaimed a religious 
war against the heretics who dared to believe in one 
Uncreate Spirit and not in three, and with a rare mix- 



30 Spain under the Visigoths, 

ture of fanaticism and shrewdness, superstition and 
self-trust, deceit and conviction, managed to identify 
the victory of his nation with the cause of religion in a 
manner psychologically most interesting. He crushed 
and slew Alaric, after having sent to the grave of Saint 
Martin of Tours, to obtain some hint of the issue of 
the war. His messengers were told to give heed to the 
psalms that should be sung in their visit to the church, 
and lo ! they turned out to be Psalms xvii. 39-40, and 
xviii. 40-41 : " Thou hast also given me the necks of 
mine enemies ; that I might destroy them that hate 
me." 

Armed with this evidence of the smile of Providence, 
Clovis marched to victory, enveloped in a cloud of 
miraculous accompaniments ; a hind, dispatched by 
one of the saints, showed him the ford over the swollen 
Vienne ; a pillar of fire flashed welcome from the pin- 
nacle of the Cathedral of Poitiers, as he moved on- 
ward. 

Thus the fate of the Visigothic empire In Gaul was 
decided by a single battle. Internal dissension, the 
lack of an hereditary succession to the throne, by 
which a great empire could have been concentrated and 
supplied with means against a day of trial, the frantic 
hostility of the Catholic population to their heterodox 
tyrants, and a loose and rotten organization of the en- 
tire military and political despotism, did the rest. The 
bastard Gesalic, son of Alaric, disputed the succession 
with his half-brother, Amalaric, while the adherents of 
the latter, accompanied by the five-year-old king him- 
self, and, according to the legend, by the jewels of 
Solomon from the temple of Jerusalem, fled pell-mell 



Regicides. 31 

over the Pyrenees, and found a refuge in the fortified 
city of Carcasonne. * 

The Frankish successes, however, were soon stemmed 
by the victorious arms of Theoderic the Great— the 
greatest of all the Gothic kings — who, warmly espous- 
ing the cause of his grandson, Amalaric, rapidly over- 
ran the south of France, and snatched it from the 
Franks. He soon, however, abandoned these con- 
quests to his enemy, whose death in 511 relieved the 
Goths of a dreaded antagonist. Theoderic united * the 
East and West Goths, remaining as long as he lived 
the guardian of the Visigothic kingdom. His death in 
526 left Amalaric sovereign of the now fully independ- 
ent kingdom' of the Visigoths, though he ceded to the 
Ostrogoths nearly all of the Gallic possessions of his 
race, and constituted the Rhone the boundary line be- 
tween the kindred, but severed nationalities. 

Amalaric's death left the throne open to the Ostro- 
gothic usurper, Theudis (531-548), who resided in the 
strong frontier fortress of Barcelona, in order to be 
near the Franks, who ceaselessly strove for possession 
of the whole of France as well as for the expulsion of 
the heretics over the Pyrenees. 

Murdered at Seville, after vain attempts to drive out 
the Byzantine garrison of Justinian from Africa, he 
was succeeded by his general, Theudigisel who, reign- 
ing ingloriously for seventeen months (548-549), was 
stabbed to death at a nocturnal banquet in Seville 
when the lights were suddenly extinguished. 

The Goths were a nation of regicides, and it was 
well said of them, that they had the " abominable habit 
* E. A. Freeman, Goths. Encyc. Brit, ninth edition. 



32 Spain under the Visigoths, 

of assassinating any king they did not like," and install- 
ing another in his place. The historian Marina wrote, 
that of the thirty-two Gothic kings, eight were usurpers, 
four were deprived of the crown, and eight were assas- 
sinated, among whom two were fratricides ; in all, 
twenty crimes out of thirty-two accessions. The lack 
of a vigorous hereditary ruler led to misdeeds, despotic 
violence and caprice, and perpetual revolution. 

In the reign of Agila (549-554), TheudigisePs suc- 
cessor Athanagild, his opponent, committed the memo- 
rable misstep of inviting Justinian to help him against 
the king. Byzantine garrisons, therefore, soon mastered 
and held for nearly seventy years, most of the Mediter- 
ranean seaports and fortresses, from Lucruna to the 
" Holy Cape," in the Atlantic Ocean, and were wel- 
comed with delight by the Catholic and Anti-Gothic 
party. Agila expiated by his blood the feebleness of 
an unlucky and ignominious reign, and Athanagild, 
a Gothic noble of influence, was recognized (554-567) 
in his stead. 

The position of Athanagild was the more perilous, 
as, besides the presence of the Greek " patricians," 
who galled his flanks and girdled his realm to the east 
and south, the Suevi now adopted the Catholic confes- 
sion and united with Greeks and Merwings to make 
common cause against the Visigothic interlopers. But 
he died before his apprehensions from these sources 
were realized. 

After an interregnum of five months, Duke Leova I. 
was elevated to the vacant dignity by the Gallic prov- 
ince, and, associating his younger brother Leovigild 
with him in the government, averted the outbreak of a 



A Real Hero. 33 

civil war. His death in 572 permitted Leovigild to 
bind together again the severed fragments of the North 
and South Pyreneean provinces, threatened with disso- 
lution. 

For a moment, amid this throng of kings, our eye is 
permitted to linger upon a real hero — a rugged, un- 
couth, immitigable barbarian, who quelled, as by magic, 
the ever-fermenting insurrectionary spirit around him, 
crushed pitilessly the . ever-lurking and insidious plots 
of Greeks, Franks, Catholics, and Romans, and, with- 
out abjuring his rooted Arianism, restored the prestige 
of the state, and ruthlessly chastised the turbulent 
nobles. " He slew all those who had got the habit of 
murdering kings," says the chronicler, Gregory; he 
gathered treasure by wholesale confiscation and in- 
creased taxation ; and he was the first of the Gothic 
kings who dressed in royal purple and sat on a throne. 
Under him, Toledo became the permanent residence of 
the kings. He corrected and added to the system of 
legislation emanating from Euric and Alaric, and he 
attempted to introduce the hereditary principle, by 
causing the two sons of his first marriage, Hermenigild, 
and Recared, to be recognized as his associates in the 
government. 

The conversion of Hermenigild to Catholicism by 
means of his Frankish wife, Ingunthis, who was also 
his step-niece, lighted the flames of civil war anew in 
the kingdom. Leovigild was, originally, by no means 
an enemy to Catholicism ; but the course of his son, 
and the eternal intrigues of his Catholic subjects, drove 
him almost to madness. Hermenigild conspired against 
his father, was beaten in battle and captured, and 



&* Spain under the Visigoths. 

though assured by his father of his personal safety was 
put to death in 585 — less, it would seem, for the 
coarse criminality of his conduct than as an heroic 
remedy for healing the dissensions of the kingdom and 
delivering it over intact into the hands of the Arian 
Recared. For, from a conflict of confessions, it had 
become a conflict of races. Goths and Romans con- 
tended desperately for preponderance, and it was only 
through the infinite tact and patience of Leovigild, 
aided by a salutary recognition on the part of the 
nation of his inexorable force, that the complex organ- 
ization held together at all. 

The downfall of the Suevian kingdom (583-584) in 
the northwest, — a stormy neighbor, always awake to 
every disadvantage and disaster that befell the Goths, — 
and its incorporation into the kingdom, left Leovigild 
virtually master of the peninsula. The last king of the 
Suevi vanished in a cloister. 

Of the Suevi prior to their migration with the Van- 
dals and Allemans or Alans to Spain, in 409, we know 
absolutely nothing. For many years the peninsula lay 
helpless before their depredations, and their power was 
enabled to maintain itself for nearly two centuries, 
owing to the impregnable cliffs and gorges amid which 
it lived and throve. Wretched Hispania, between these 
two Germanic peoples — Goths and Suevi — was in- 
deed "ground to pieces as between two millstones." 
" The dim twilight of church legends " hangs around 
the miracle-accompanied conversion of the Suevi to 
Catholicism, in 560. The final amalgamation of Suevi 
and Goths under Leovigild in 585, obliterated forever 
all lines of distinction between the rival establishments, 



The Last of the Goths. 35 

though it has been suggested that the noticeable differ- 
ences between Portuguese and Spaniard may have 
arisen from the fact that ancient Lusitania was the 
abode of the Suevi, while the Goths spread themselves 
over the rest of the kingdom. As late as Philip lE.'s 
day, Suevosos, los sevosos, is said to have been a nick- 
name given by the Castilians to the Portuguese. 

At the instance of Philip II., the great saint-monger, 
who even asked that the Cid might be niched among 
the beatified saints, Hermenigild was enrolled among 
the noble army of martyrs. 

Leovigild died at Toledo in 586, in the midst of 
negotiations for peace with the Merwings — " the glory 
of his heroism darkened," says the pious Isidore, " by 
the error of his misbelief." 

He was the last of the antique type of Arian Goths, 
and he battled in the old Gothic way against the old 
immemorial perils. Catholicism • a sanguinary nobility 
"chain-mailed in complicated intrigue ; " and continual 
perils from within, were met by him with wonderful 
sagacity, vanquished, temporarily at least, and set at 
rest, for the time being. In the next reign, Catholicism 
is in the ascendant, the Arians are the persecuted, 
and a homogeneous Spain, henceforth to be ruled by 
the ecclesiastical parliaments of Toledo, and going 
slowly to pieces under that rule, becomes ripe and 
rotten, through every manner of moral corruption, for 
the Berber conquest. And out of this is to rise the 
evolution of that beautiful Castilian chivalry, whose 
achievements, for seven hundred years, rang in the ears 
of the civilized world, and evoked a matchless min- 
strelsy precious to the hearts of all lovers of poetry. 



36 Spain under the Visigoths. 

The one hundred and fifteen years from the conver- 
sion of the Goths to Catholicism, to their utter down- 
fall before the Arabs, form a period crowded with 
events. Recared I. (586-601), Leovigild's son and 
successor, whether yielding to the superior organization 
of the church of Rome, its intellectual superiority and 
culture, its unexampled consistency, amid the shifting 
phases and time-serving spirit of Arianism ; or whether, 
— despite his witnessing, and silently approving, the 
martyrdom of his sainted brother, Hermenigild, — a sin- 
cere convert to the eloquence and astuteness of the 
Catholic prelates, — Recared, at length gave way to a 
faith which was now triumphant in Italy, Gaul, and 
the Orient, and declared himself, in 586, " moved by 
heavenly and earthly motives," to adopt Catholicism. 



CHAPTER II. 
SPAIN UNDER THE VISIGOTHS (Continued). 

THE " earthly reasons " doubtless preponderated, 
and circumstances compelled Recared to fly 
into the arms of the Holy Church, as a protection 
against his own nobles, and the misery of an eternal 
wrangle with the rebellious common people. The 
wealth, moral influence, education, system of the 
Catholic clergy, alone seemed able to save him from 
his inner and outer enemies, and to assist him to cope 
with the difficulties of his situation. The flattery of 
these hallucinations — the salvation of himself and his 
people within the pale of an inexorable machine — 
proved the ruin of the Visigothic monarchy. Hence- 
forth it lost its independence, became a chattel of the 
councils of Toledo, and the horrified barbarians had to 
witness the spectacle of a king, crawling on his knees, 
and blubbering penitentially before the despotic metro- 
politan of the capital. 

Multitudes, both of the common people and the 
Gothic grandees, followed the royal example, though a 
total conversion took place only in the gradual progress 
of time. Fierce persecution of the Arians immediately 
ensued ; they were to be excluded from all civil and 
military employments, to be exterminated root and 

37 



38 Spain under the Visigoths. 

branch, and their books — if necessary, themselves — 
to be burned. 

After the overthrow of his Arian step-mother, Godis- 
wintha (who had formed a league with the Franks for 
the destruction of her second step-son), and the repulse 
of the Frankish attack in Septimania, with loss of sixty 
thousand Franks to three hundred Goths (?), Recared 
lived in tolerable peace with his people, though fre- 
quently harassed by Arian, Basque, and Byzantine in- 
roads. He modified the Gothic state usages extensively, 
assumed at his solemn coronation the title "Flavins" 
reorganized the internal policy of the kingdom, and by 
his strict alliance of church with state, against the 
lay nobility, and the reconciliation between Goths and 
Romans, which he accomplished, did much to amelio- 
rate and tranquillize the condition of his people. The 
Gothic was not a tranquil civilization ; it was tempest- 
uous, lawless, insubordinate — the prey of passionate 
religious beliefs, the plaything of any vivid-minded and 
ambitious leader. Hence the necessity of some univer- 
sally recognized principle of authority, — a principle 
happily, as Recared thought, discovered in the Church 
of Rome. 

It followed logically, from Recared's point of view, 
that the third council of Toledo, composed of sixty- 
two bishops, led by the polished Leander of Seville and 
Mausona of Merida (589), should become actually an 
imperial parliament as well as a ghostly convention. 
And here, for the first time, was acknowledged the 
supremacy of the church not only over the spiritual 
and secular aristocracy, but over the crown itself. 
Goths and Romans blended harmoniously together after 



Reeared. 39 

the religious breach between them had been filled up. 
A Romanization of the Goths, rather than a German- 
ization of the Romans, followed from the numerical 
superiority of the latter, as a matter of course. Though 
Roman measures and weights had been used in Spain, 
the Roman reckoning of time had not, but was now 
first adopted by the Goths. Reeared 's code of laws 
for his people became immensely modified by the Ro- 
man law ; and the Roman-Byzantine titles, mode of 
administration, attributes, functions, even court eti- 
quette, penetrated more and more into Spain. 

We find the king good-humored, affable, a builder of 
churches and monasteries, the " pater patrice. " of a 
legendary Golden Age. His administration was of 
singular importance for the whole future of Spain ; and 
though fundamentally different from his father, Reeared 
had a gentle and beneficent genius, whose spirit ex- 
erted no less influence than Leovigild's had done. 
He died in the oclor of sanctity, and was followed by 
his son, Leova II. (601-603). 

Leova II. fell a victim to a final rising of the Arians, 
and being taken prisoner, it is affirmed that his right 
hand was struck off and he himself slain by Count 
Witteric, an Arian Goth (603-610). The attempted 
renaissance of Arianism under this vigorous upstart 
failed, and he, like Theudigisel, was killed at a banquet 

(610). 

Gunthimar (Gun-demar), his successor, a simulacrum 
of a king, who has scarcely cast a shadow across the 
page of history, reigned till 612, and is chiefly memor- 
able for the huge cluster of unverified traditions that 
have gathered about his supposed church policy. 



40 Spain under the Visigoths. 

The reign of Sisibut, his follower, was distinguished 
for the final cession by the Byzantines, of all their pos- 
sessions on the Mediterranean, the sole exception 
being a small corner of the peninsula on the Atlantic. 
A whole chain of fortresses and cities thus came into 
the possession of the Goths (615-616), but there is no 
proof that this king reconquered in Africa the towns 
(Tangier and Ceuta) which had been lost under Theu- 
dis and are found in possession of Roderic when the 
Berbers crossed into Spain. 

Great mildness, intelligence, and devotion to science 
and art are attributed to Sisibut ; he wrote philo- 
sophical works, built the famous church of St. Leo- 
cadia at Toledo, distinguished himself by the refine- 
ment and subtlety of his rhetoric, wrote a chronicle 
of the Goths, now lost, and was — "guilty of verses," 
hard to pardon even in a king ! He was a burning 
fanatic, and under him began that dismal chain of per- 
secutions of the Jews which links the name of Sisibut, 
through nearly nine centuries, to that of Ferdinand 
and Isabella. Political and national motives were of 
course at the bottom of these persecutions. 

Undeniably, the wealth won by the Jews by usury 
roused the envy and religious passions of their con- 
temporaries. They had been extraordinarily successful 
in Spain. Apart from this, the church had an interest 
in the salvation of their souls and — the appropriation 
of their money chests. Even before the Gothic con- 
quest, Spain had become celebrated for the passionate- 
ness of its spiritual beliefs, and we may well be as- 
sured that the present hierarchy did not let the holy 
fires slumber or go out. 



Swintila, father of the Poor. 41 

The first notice of the addiction of the Spanish peo- 
ple to the national sport of bull-fighting, seems to occur 
in this reign, in a letter of rebuke addressed by the 
pious king to the bishop Eusebius. 

Sisibut died in 620, and was succeeded by his son 
Recared II. (620-621), who reigned for a year. Sis- 
ibut's brave general, Swintila (621-631) was chosen to 
succeed Recared, and won great glory by expelling the 
last traces of the Byzantines from the kingdom, after 
they had nested in the sea-ports, and clung to the 
precipices of the peninsula for seventy years. Sisibut's 
admirable spirit of conciliation towards the Byzantine 
intruders, and the threatened invasion of the Eastern 
empire by the Persians and Avars, had prepared the 
way for these important acquisitions. He was called 
the " father of the poor," from his efforts to ameliorate 
the condition of the serfs, and to keep down the haughty 
spirit of the church and nobility. Devotedly as the 
Gothic people loved the principle of free choice in 
selecting their kings, and opposed as they were consti- 
tutionally, to recognizing in any of their clans the right 
to furnish them with hereditary rulers, they yet permit- 
ted Swintila to associate with himself in the govern- 
ment, his son Rikimir, as co-regent and successor. He 
allowed no councils to assemble during the ten years of 
his reign, for they might only too eloquently have 
shown the power of the episcopacy, and have led to re- 
newed troubles. Swintila's character, hence, was sys- 
tematically blackened by the clergy ; he was declared 
godless, avaricious, and bloodthirsty ; wholesale mur- 
der and confiscation were attributed to him ; and the 



42 Spain under the Visigoths. 

affection of the people was undermined and alienated 
by the insinuations of their agents, 

Sisinant, a Gothic count, rose against him in Gaul, 
was crowned king, and purchased the help of Dagobert 
of Neustria by means of the famous golden basin, 
weighing five hundred pounds, said to have been ex- 
torted by Thorismund, the conqueror of Attila, from 
the Romans, as compensation for certain booty sur- 
rendered. They poured over the Pyrenees with numer- 
ous troops, penetrated to Saragossa, and succeeded in 
stripping Swintila of all his dependants. Sisinant (631) 
was universally recognized king, and Swintila and his 
son seem to have gone into a cloister. 

Sisinant became the mere tool of the bishops, the 
restoration of whose power was now complete. The theo- 
cratic tinge of the Visigothic monarchy became darker 
and deeper than ever. Amid floods of tears the king 
fell on his knees before the fathers at the council of 
Toledo (633), and supplicated them for their interces- 
sion with God. 

The characteristic notice of him is that " Sisinant 
reigned three years, held a council of the bishops, was 
patient, and followed the orthodox Catholic rules." 

This council asserted, more emphatically than ever, 
the absolute freedom of choice as to rulers, whilst all 
rebellion against the rightful king, when elected, was 
menaced with the ban. The bishops controlled, how- 
ever, the election of the next king, Kindila (636-640) 
whose "many synods, and great strengthening of the 
empire through the faith," are concisely commemorated 
in a couple of lines. Thunders of excommunication 
were threatened against insurrection, magical practices, 



Ecclesiastical Intrigue. 43 

and the setting up of a rival king ; the children of the 
king were protected by special penalties ; and the per- 
son of the king himself was sought to be made inviola- 
ble. Every successor was bound henceforth (638) to 
avenge his predecessor in case of murder, and to free him- 
self from the possible suspicion of guilt, by the thorough- 
ness of this vengeance. The priest-ridden monarch went 
so far as to say that none but Catholics should live in his 
kingdom, and by his triumphant orthodoxy won over the 
bishops to recognize his son Tulga (640-641) as his 
successor. All the later annals, indeed, of this process 
of king-manufacture by church councils, are fumigated 
with incense and resonant with the chant of the kurie 
cleeison. The kings were bits of crowned wax in the 
lingers of their unctuous manipulators. Everywhere 
there is the reek of ecclesiastical intrigue. Everywhere 
the bishop's crook is intertwined with the king's sceptre, 
and it is difficult to distinguish whether it is a mitre or a 
crown that the king wears. 

The alliance between church and state, however, was 
not so indissoluble but that the secular grandees — the 
great Gothic princely families — winced under the heel 
of the clergy. Though the clergy were singularly clear- 
sighted as to their ultimate obj ect, — opulent, unscrup- 
ulous, powerfully intrenched in their church organization, 
and numerous, — they could not absolutely extinguish 
the martial spirit of the ancient Visigothic chieftains. 
This was soon shown in the rise of a distinguished 
Goth, Kindaswint (641-652), who caused himself to 
be proclaimed king, and the young king to be tonsured, 
and thrust into a cloister — at once nursery and hos- 
pital for immature or superannuated kinglets. 



44 Spain under the Visigoths, 

In Kindaswint, once more — almost for the last time 
— flashes up the fire of the old Goths. Nearly eighty 
when he seized the reins of government, his will of iron 
aimed at no less than the establishment of a strong 
and concentrated kingdom, the breaking of the back- 
bone of rebellion, the extirpation of refractory nobles, 
and the banishment of turbulent intriguers to France 
or Africa. The clergy was strongly represented among 
the " emigrants," who found it convenient to shun the 
wrath of this fierce octogenarian. He and his son, 
Rekiswint, established a system of Germanic law in 
place of the Roman breviary of Alaric, previously in 
force ; they reformed thoroughly the courts and their 
procedure ; compelled contumacious bishops and priests 
to appear before the secular judges ; made provision 
for the faithful carrying-out of verdicts once rendered • 
menaced peasant and paladin with the same criminal 
code, with the same punishment ; and bettered the 
legislation that concerned the lower classes. A zealous 
Christian, Kindaswint lived on excellent terms with 
all decent ecclesiastics; he showed literary culture: 
associated with scholars and poets ; and full of years, 
and soon to be venerated by the superstitious monks 
as a saint, died at the age of ninety, in 652. Rekis- 
wint, who had governed with him for three years, suc- 
ceeded to the throne (649-672). 

Again, as in the case of Recared, and Leovigild, we 
have the sunshine after the storm — the lamb following 
the lion. History tells of Rekiswint, that his character 
was irradiated with gentleness, that he delighted in edi- 
fying conversation, made important concessions to the 
church, and blamed the rigor of his father in his con- 



Rekiswint. 45 

troversies with the bishops. He purchased concilia- 
tion, however, at the expense of the future welfare and 
independence of his country. Far from consolidating, 
he dissolved existing institutions ; he indulged the 
aggressive aristocracy, pardoned rebels, and instituted 
umpires to decide cases between king and people. The 
relaxation of important taxes weakened the means of 
the government ; it was said of him, that he robbed the 
monarch to enrich the monarchy. Solemnly and cir- 
cumstantially recognizing the unlimited freedom of 
choice of the king resting in the nobles, both church 
and lay, numerous church assemblies and renewed per- 
secution of the Jews sealed his orthodoxy as undoubt- 
ed. Saint and Virgin make miraculous apparitions 
during his reign, and a rain of gold, silver, pearls, and 
precious stones, emanating from the royal hands, bedews 
the churches of his kingdom. Bitter blame, however, 
is given to his humility — a trait signally out of place 
in a system founded, like this, on might. 

Rekiswint passed away near Salamanca, in 672. The 
Gothic grandees, obeying the law that the new king 
must be chosen at the place where the deceased king 
had died, flocked to Salamanca. Wamba, one of the 
most prominent of them, was chosen to fill the vacancy. 
The usual luxuriance of legend, so fantastically abund- 
ant in these later times, twines about Wamba's acces- 
sion • we are told, for example, how Pope Leo proph- 
esied his elevation, and how, Cincinnatus-like, he was 
called away from the plough to the palace ; how he 
declared it as impossible for him to be king, as for the 
staff with which he was driving his oxen to sprout in 
his hand ; and how the staff did sprout and, moreover. 



46 Spain under the Visigoths. 

blossom. We are dramatically introduced to him in 
the annals of a contemporary biographer, who tells us 
how grief for the dead king, not ambition, had brought 
him to Salamanca, although his noble race, his ripe 
wisdom, his tried virtue, could not but lift him to the 
throne : hence, unanimity of decision among the gran- 
dees, obstinate refusal and tears of surprised modesty 
on Wamba's part, eventually overcome, by one of the 
grandees seizing a sword and threatening to kill him 
as a traitor to his native land, if he persisted in jeop- 
ardizing its welfare by declining. Then we have a 
dove-like cloud, and, according to another legend, a 
dove and a bee, ascending skyward from his head, at 
his coronation in Toledo, in 672. 

Insurrections north of the Pyrenees and under 
the Byzantine Duke Paulus in Galicia and Asturias, 
troubled the early years of his reign. Paulus's aspira- 
tions to the throne ended in total discomfiture and a 
dunce-cap ; for, being besieged in Nimes, celebrated 
for its splendid amphitheatre, he was captured with the 
city : the rebels were dragged in chains — with shaven 
heads and chins (a brand of ignominy), and clad in cam- 
el's hair — through the streets, and Paulus himself was 
decked as it afterwards became the fashion to deck the 
martyrs at an auto defe. The Basque guerrilleros, cling- 
ing to their eagles' nests among the porphyry cliffs of the 
Pyrenees, were soon brought to terms, and even-thing 
tended to the belief that a brilliant and able adminis- 
tration had begun. YVamba, it is said, vigorously re- 
formed the navy, and repelled the first invasion of the 
Arabs under Acba, the general of the Khalif Yezid, 
though it is thought that the campaign is legendary. 



King Wamba. 



47 



Society and the state equally demanded heroic meas- 
ures, if salvation from within and from without was to be 
expected. The slaves were called to arms, only a tenth of 
the whole number being allowed to stay at home for the 
cultivation of the fields. The great free middle class, 
the bulwark of the kingdom, had fearfully diminished, 
either crushed into the rank of serfs or sunk by debt 




King Wamba. 



into that of slaves ; and the very heart of the monarchy, 
the mainspring of defence and national independence, 
was gone. There was no longer any enthusiasm to fol- 
low the king's summons to arms, and there arose a lux- 
urious aristocracy, steeped in effeminacy, superstitious, 
inactive, and unintelligent, which but ill-supplied the 
place of the middle class. The utmost acrimony de~ 



48 Spain under the Visigoths. 

veloped against Wamba on the side of the church, for 
his unsparing use of its wealth in the defence of the 
land, and it was probably to church intrigue that he 
owed his fall. 

Among all his paladins none was more honored by 
Wamba than Erwic, a Goth, son of the Greek Arde- 
bast and a relation of the king. He handed the king a 
deadly potion, which, instead of killing him, threw him 
into a death-like stupor, during which he was seized, 
tonsured, and thrust into a monk's habit (680). 

Erwic was immediately proclaimed king, though Wam- 
ba continued to live tranquilly as a monk in a monaste- 
ry near Burgos. His resignation is attributed to his 
consciousness of the power of his adversary, and the 
superstition that even a " moine malgre lui," as Mon- 
talambert calls him, could no longer interest himself in 
the affairs of this world. 

Erwic's chief support was the powerful archbishop of To- 
ledo, Julian, whose arrogance soon became unbearable, 
A palace revolution, whose principal actors were priests, 
augured ill for this reign, which, in fact, was eight 
years of disaster, corruption, and concession. The 
privileges and powers of clergy and nobles, continually 
increased to the detriment of the crown, prepared the 
way slowly but surely for the inevitable downfall of a 
kingdom nearly 300 years old. Tyranny, indecency, 
contempt of law, frantic party spirit, eternal rebellion, 
oppression of the slaves, the conversion of whole 
provinces into the private possessions of an abandoned 
upper class ; all this was an emphatic preparation for 
Taric and his hordes. Erwic's laws against the Jews — 
who, dismal as their fate had been, had exhibited great 
culture and showed great skill in theological contro- 



The Exiled Jews, 49 

versy with the Christian doctors, — reveal a cruelty and 
fanaticism worthy of the inquisition. Concessions were 
one by one made on all sides but this ; taxes remitted, 
Wamba's policy of defence for the kingdom fatally 
weakened, fugitives who had forfeited freedom and 
honor, pardoned ; in short, a period of universal disin- 
tegration set in. 

Erwic at length retired in disgust — sick, conscience- 
smitten, and tormented by superstition — to a cloister, 
leaving the throne, as a compensation for the infamy of 
his conduct, not to his own children, but to Egica, a 
nephew of Wamba. 

Erwic's reign has been well described as one long 
abdication, which did more harm to the Gothic empire 
than the most tyrannical conduct would have done. 

Egica was Erwic's son-in-law, and though devoted to 
Catholicism would not permit himself to be ground to 
pieces beneath the heel of its votaries. He banished 
Sisbert, the primate of Spain who had been engaged in 
a conspiracy to assassinate the king and his family. 

A new factor of great peril to the state now appears 
in formidable shape : the tortured, maltreated Jews, who 
had left their homes and had gone to settle in neigh- 
boring lands, especially in Africa, whence they kept up 
relations with the so-called Christianized Jews in Spain. 
Their position in Africa was far more tolerable than in 
Spain, as the ordinances fulminated against them by the 
Byzantine emperors had been suffered to fall into dis- 
use ; and, on the conquest of Africa by the followers of 
.Mahomet, the Hebrews, as belonging to a strictly 
mono-theistic faith which did not recognize image-wor- 
ship in any form, were allowed full exercise of their 



50 Spain under the Visigoths. 

faith, and only had to pay the small capitation tax which 
was exacted by the Mahometans of all subject tribes of 
odier creeds. The comparison between their condition 
in Africa and in Spain increased their hatred for the op- 
pressor ; they conspired with the Spanish Jews, and, 
probably, with the Arabs, with a yiew to an invasion of 
Spain by the Arabs, and the liberation of their country- 
men from the misery of .their situation. Their fury 
reached the highest pitch when, in 694, the council of 
Toledo resolved upon their universal enslavement and 
distribution among the Christian families of the realm. 

This trunrpet-blast of fanaticism rings in our ears as 
the last authentic act of the great Gothic state. We 
know next to nothing of the last seventeen years of its 
existence and we leave the firm ground of history for a 
battle-ground of innumerable legends, bright, fantastic, 
beautiful, and misleading. 

Before his decease, however, the king contrived to 
get his son Witica, Duke of Galicia, acknowledged as 
his successor. 

That Witica was greatly beloved by his people, greatly 
detested by the priesthood, that he energetically resisted 
the encroachments. of the bishops, that he was dissolute 
in his conduct, that he recalled those who had been un- 
justly banished, and restored to them their offices and 
property, and that he generously destroyed the fraudu- 
lent acknowledgments of debt extorted by his father 
from his subjects, is all that we can extract of certain, 
from the meagre annals of the time. About him, as 
about his successor, Roderic, — "Don Rodrigo, the last 
of the Goths/' — play the lights of a thousand legends. 
Spanish romance has enshrined them both in imperish- 



Roderic^ the, last of the Groths. 51 

able lines, and it is difficult to separate truth from fic- 
tion. 

Witica seems to have died a natural death (710), and 
Roderic clings to history by the finest of gossamer 
threads. * That he existed at all, is known to us alone 
from the lists of the names of the Gothic kings that ex- 
tend down to him. A single doubtful coin with his 
name on it, and a legendary grave inscription at Viseu, 
in Portugal, attributed to him, cast a moribund illumina- 
tion over his shadowy form. The zeal of the genealo- 
gists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has 
hitherto served to vitalize this kingly exhalation, and 
make it palpitate before us in flesh and blood ; but their 
effort was purely political, and their object was, to give 
greater splendor to the Spanish monarchy than to the 
French kingdom and the German empire, by tracing 
its kings in a straight line, back to the Emperor Theodo- 
sius ; and to do so, a mistake in a spelling, or a blun- 
dering reading, led to the insertion of a supposititious 
king Acausa, thrust in between Witica and Roderic, to 
make the genealogical nexus complete. 

Roderic's name is a peg upon which countless charm- 
ing inventions have been hung. Spanish Christians 
and Arabian poets, ballad-writers and ancient chroni- 
clers, historians to whose heads the wine of these delight- 
ful fictions has but too readily mounted, and verse- 
writers in search of a graceful and pathetic theme, 
have made of " Don Rodrigo " the incarnation of their 
own subtly-woven fancies. 

" Roderic, the son of that brave Duke Theodifred, 
whom Witica blinded," says the legend, " leaped upon 
the throne after Witica's death, and excluded the kind's 



52 Spain under the Visigoths. 

sons from the succession. These princes, and the gov- 
ernor of Africa, Count Julian, whom the king had pre- 
viously driven to deadly revenge, by the seduction of his 
lovely daughter, Dona Cava, or Florincla, called the 
Arabs secretly into the land. In the decisive battle, 
wherein the king appeared in a chariot drawn by eight 
white mules, the traitors, to whom the flanks of the 
Christian host had been entrusted, went over to the 
enemy, and battle and realm were lost forever to the 
Goths. King Roderic vanished. His golden shoes 
were found in the reeds by the river." 

History simply says, that the decayed Visigothic 
commonwealth had long been ripe for destruction when 
the light-footed Arabs, invincibly fierce and potent, 
crossed the strait and gave it the finishing blow. A 
kingdom ulcerated with ever}' - imaginable evil as this 
one was — partisanship, contending nobles, clash of 
church with state, religious persecution, brigandage on 
a gigantic scale, extirpation of a free middle class, 
peopling of mountains and forest with thousands of 
runaway slaves, ready to join any conqueror — was 
ready for a catastrophe. Well has it been said that the 
legend has typically attributed the fatal aberrations of 
the entire nation, its extravagance and its party hate, to 
the last kings, Witica and Roderic. 

Roderic had no successor. In the great battle of 
Xeres de la frontera, the Berbers commanded by Taric 
the One-eyed, were victorious, and in a few days, says the 
historian, watered their horses, in their progress from 
south-west to north-east, in the Guadalquivir, the 
Guadiana, and the Tagus, — capturing the great cities, 
of Cordova, Malaga, Granada (Illiberis), and Toledo, 



Visigothic Kings. 



53 



the venerable capital of the peninsula, and occupying 
the whole country except the extreme north-west. 

But out of this extreme corner, and from this unex- 
ampled amalgamation of races — Celtlberians, Ro- 
mans, Goths, and Arabs — was to grow a new and more 
splendid feudal empire, illustrated by the beautiful light 
of Christian chivalry and memorable for its early rec- 
ognition of municipal rights, constitutional liberty, the 
power of faith, and the power of discovery. 

Chronological Table of the Visigothic Kings. 



Athanaric, 


3 66(?)- 3 8i* 


Recared I., 


586-601 


Alaric I., 


395-4IQ 


Leova II., 


601-603 


Athaulf, 


410-415 


Witteric, 


603-610 


Sigric, 


4i5"4i5t 


Gunthimar, 


610-612 


Wallia, 


415-419 


Sisibut, 


612-620 


Theoderic I., 


419-451 


Recared II., 


620-621 


Thorismund, 


45 r -453 


Swintila, 


620-631 


Theoderic II., 


453-466 


Rikimir, 


?-6 3 i 


Euric, 


466-485 


( Sisinant, 
1 Kindila, 


631-636 


Alaric II., 


485-507 


636-640 


f Gesalic, 


507-5 11 


Tulga, 


640-641 


1 Amalaric, 


5o7-53i 


f Kindaswint, 


641-652 


Theudis, 


531-548 


( Rekiswint, 


649-672 


Theudigisel 


548-549 


Wamba, 


672-680 


Agila 


549-554 


Erwic, 


680-687 


Athanagild, 


554-567 


( Egica, 
1 Witica, 


687-701 


( Leova I., 
1 Leovigild, 


5 6 7-572 


697-710 


567-586 


Roderic, 


7 10-7 1 1 


* Frithigern ? 


t September, 





CHAPTER III. 

THE BERBER CONQUEST AND THE KHALIFATE. 

WITH the great victory of Xeres de la frontera, 
in 711, the history of Spain changes as by a 
stroke of enchantment. Hitherto the polished tyranny 
of the Caesars, and the rugged autocracy of the Visi- 
goths, swarming with classic reminiscences and uncouth 
names, have employed our attention. Now the fabric 
of three hundred years — the laborious despotism of 
the followers of Alaric — vanishes like a dream. 

The conquest of Spain was due to the Berbers, not 
to the Arabs. The Berbers, while having many peculi- 
arities in common with the Arabs, were in other re- 
spects very different from them. A heterogeneous mass, 
peopling the shores of the Mediterranean, from Egypt 
to the Atlantic ocean, they were a fierce, warlike, lib- 
erty-loving race, deeply stained with fanaticism of an 
eccentric sort. Nomadic, homeless Bohemians in their 
habits, accustomed to an immemorial independence 
which the Roman arms had but faintly infringed, hav- 
ing the same political organization as the Arabs — a 
"democracy tempered by the influence of noble families " 
— they became as terrible adversaries to the Arabs of the 
West, when the latter attempted to reduce them, as the 
Arabs of the East had become to the Byzantine empire 
and Persia. " To conquer Africa, is impossible," wrote 



Arabs and Berbers Compared. 57 

a governor to the Khalif Abdelmelic ; " scarcely is one 
Berber tribe conquered, when another takes its place."' 
With unequalled obstinacy and admirable courage, 
however, the Arabs persisted in their purpose to over- 
run the Berber country, and after seventy years of 
murderous conflict, they succeeded, though on condi- 
tion that the Berbers should be treated not as a van- 
quished nation, but as equals. 

The sceptical and accomplished Arabs, too, were to 
the earnest and gloomy Berbers as the cultivated 
aristocracy of Rome had been to the uncivilized Visigoths 
The Arab princes, passionately devoted to poetry, to 
women, to wine, to spiritual and sprightly conversation, 
did not disdain, now and then, to put up the Koran as a 
target, and speed their sacrilegious arrows through the 
precious volume. The Berber chieftains, on the other 
hand, profoundly imbued by non-conformist missionaries 
with the spirit of Mahometanism, followed their priests 
with blind veneration, became immersed in grovelling 
superstitions, paid to their marabout teachers a devotion 
unknown to the railing and disillusioned Arabs, and. as 
has been well said, accomplished great things — the 
foundation of the vast empires of the Almoravides and 
Almohades — when set in motion by a priest. 

Islamism, originally hateful to the Berber race, had 
become, a hundred years after the death of its famous 
apostle, their most precious possession. To them it 
was no icy religion, half frozen between deism and infi- 
delity, preached by unimpassioned missionaries, " telling 
them what they owed the khalif, but never what the 
khalif owed them.'' It was the enthusiastic faith preached 
by bold and persuasive dissenters from orthodox Ma- 



58 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

hometanism who, tracked like wild beasts in the Orie.it, 
had escaped their persecutors through a thousand dan- 
gers, found an asylum in the glowing deserts of Africa, 
and propagated their doctrines with brilliant success 
along the line of the conquests of Belisarius. " Mus 
sulman Calvinism had at length found its Scotland." 
The irreligious Arab spirit, viewing all things ligntl 
from the point of view of pleasurable sensation or cyn 
ical indifference, looked either with contempt or horror 
on these uncompromising sectaries ; now treating them 
with condescending tolerance, now contemplating them 
with undisguised disgust. Such were the future con- 
querors of Spain. 

The situation of the peninsula was indeed deplorable 
enough, and the date of the misery lay far back in 
Roman times. Immense territorial possessions in the 
hands of a few ; multitudes of ruined burghers, serfs, 
and slaves ; enormous taxation crushing out the life of 
the poor, and filling the pockets of the rich ; honorary 
titles and magistracies innumerable, to which no definite 
duties were attached ; uncurbed luxury disporting itself, 
at the expense of the people, in gorgeous villas that 
overhung beautiful rivers, shrouded in olives and vines, 
hung with Syrian and Persian tapestries, encumbered 
by slaves, filled with guests stretched out on purple 
rugs, who improvised verses, listened to musicians, or 
looked at dancing women ; a starving plebs covered 
with rags and swarming with vermin ; throngs of pau- 
pers kept alive by charitable contributions, and rendered 
unspeakably ignoble by gloating over gross and barba- 
rous spectacles ; the petty proprietors in the towns re- 
duced to profound distress by the exactions of the 



A. Tempest of Barbarians. 5$ 

Roman fiscal system ; bankrupt communities ; forests 
thronged with fugitives from justice ; such was the con- 
dition of things even under the Caesars. A single 
Christian in Gaul owned five thousand slaves, another 
eight thousand ; and these slaves were treated with 
such rigor, that a case is mentioned in which three hun- 
dred lashes were given because one of their class had 
failed to bring his lord his warm water punctually. 
Brigandage springing from this source, even in the time 
of Diocletian, had assumed such proportions in the 
Gauls, that an army commanded by a Caesar had to be 
sent to crush it. 

It hardly required a tempest of barbarians to over- 
throw, as by a breath, a society honeycombed by such 
evils as these. Spain lay paralyzed before the Suevi, 
the Alans, the Vandals, and the Visigoths. The ap- 
proach of the barbarians, instead of being signalized 
by desperate resistance on the part of the Peninsula, 
was viewed with a serenity that seemed imperturbable. 
Nothing could be worse than Roman tyranny ; hence, 
while the sombre invaders were knocking at the gates of 
the Spanish cities, we are told that the inhabitants, far 
from rivaling the memories of Saguntum and Numantia, 
gave themselves up to drunkenness, gluttony, singing, 
dancing — threw themselves into the arms of beautiful 
slaves, or rushed to the amphitheatres, where they might 
glut their sanguinary appetites on the agonies of gladi- 
ators. The Vandals happily passed into Africa (429), 
but the Suevi and the Visigoths planted themselves in 
the land for three centuries, and made the people look 
back with regret to the tyranny of Rome, insupportable 
as that had been. 



60 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

During this dark period, the light of learning and 
piety was kept ablaze by the clergy. In the end, many 
preferred to be penniless and free under the dominion 
of the Goths, to being wealthy and pillaged under the 
dominion of Rome. Kings praying before the battle 
in hair shirts ; victories, recognized as coming straight 
from the hand of the Eternal, succeeded to the order 
and civilization, the scepticism and luxury of the earlier 
and more enlightened pagan time. The condition of 
the serfs had been viewed with tender solicitude by the 
Catholic clergy before their advent to power under Re- 
cared, and they had been promised emancipation ; but 
the poverty, scorn, oppression, persecution, did not 
cease when the clergy rose to influence, and their 
promise was forgotten. The middle class remained as 
it had been, unameliorated, unaided, bankrupt. The 
persecutions of the Jews broke out under Sisibut in 616 
and eighty years of suffering were borne- in silence, till, 
seventeen years before the invasion of Spain by the 
Berbers, they resolved upon a general rising with the 
help of their co-religionaries in Africa, where several 
Berber tribes professed Judaism, and many exiled Jews 
had found a refuge. The plot was discovered, and 
from a religious persecution of misbelievers the policy 
of the government changed in an instant to one of ex- 
tirpation of dangerous conspirators. Consequently, at 
the moment of the Mussulman conquest of north- 
western Africa, the Jews were groaning under a savage 
yoke. They prayed for the hour of deliverance ; they 
welcomed conquerors, who, for a small tribute, would 
restore them to liberty and permit them the free exer- 
cise of their cult. 



Count Julian. 61 

The Jews, serfs, and poverty-stricken burghers of 
Spain had thus become transformed into so many im- 
placable enemies of a social condition leprous with 
every imaginable disease, and crumbling to pieces with 
inner rottenness. And yet slaves and Jews were all 
the wealthier classes had to oppose to the Berber in- 
vaders. Both Romans and Goths had been obliged to 
call the agricultural laborers to arms, and the army had 
to be recruited largely from them. From a tenth of 
their serfs, the proprietors seem to have been obliged 
to enroll fully one half for military service, so that the 
number of servile soldiers in the army must have sur- 
passed the number of free men. Hence the defence of 
the state had fallen into the hands of those most hostile 
to it. What could be expected of a horde of circum- 
cised pessimists and mutinous chattels in a conflict for 
the very life or death of the State ? The germs of dis- 
solution being thus contained in the system itself, all 
that was necessary to overthrow it completely, was an 
army of twelve thousand men under a capable leader. 

The limits of the Arabian empire, under the Khalif 
Walid had been extended by Mousa-ibn-Nocair, his 
general in Africa, to the Atlantic ocean. The city of 
Ceuta alone, opposite Gibraltar, and held for the By- 
zantine empire by Julian, its governor, now remained of 
all Belisarius's conquests along the coast. 

The legend is, that Count Julian had sent his daugh- 
ter to the court of Toledo, to be educated in accord- 
ance with her birth. But she was dishonored by Rod- 
eric ; whereupon Julian, enraged, concluded a treaty 
with Mousa, opened the gates of Ceuta to the Arabs, 
spoke eloquently of the beauty and fascinations of 



62 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

Spain, engaged him to attempt the conquest of the 
country, and placed vessels at his disposal to cross to 
the Spanish coast. 

" Let Spain be explored by light troops, but for the 
present guard against exposing a great army to the 
perils of an expedition beyond the sea," replied the 
Khalif Walid to Mousa, in response to an inquiry for 
instructions: 

A preliminary exploring party, therefore, crossed to 
Algeziras, the "green isle," (710) under Tarif, reconnoi- 
tred and pillaged the country, and then returned. 

The following year, Roderic being away in the North, 
quelling an insurrection of the Basques, Taric-ibn-Ziyad, 
one of Mousa's clients and the general of the vanguard, 
was sent over with seven thousand Mussulmans, nearly 
all Berbers, accompanied by Julian. The army assem- 
bled upon the mountain which still bears Taric's name, 
Gibraltar (Gebal-Taric), but learning that Roderic, at 
the head of a vast army, from forty thousand to one 
hundred thousand, was advancing against him, he sent 
for an additional force of five thousand Berbers. 

Treason, however, was the most potent ally of the 
invaders. Though no hereditary succession existed in the 
Visigothic monarchy, the legend reports that Roderic, 
supported by many grandees, had dethroned Witica 
(Witiza) his predecessor, and thus " deprived " the sons 
and brothers of the late king of their " right " to the 
succession. 

Menaced by the approach of Taric, Roderic sum- 
moned them to his assistance, having previously tried in 
every way lo appease their resentment. They obeyed 
his commands, but formed the project of delivering him 



A Fantastic Theatre-Figure. 63 

into the hands of the enemy 5 not that they thought of 
delivering their fatherland into barbarian hands, for it 
was believed that the Berbers had only come on a tem- 
porary raid, — which was the truth, — and not for the 
purpose of establishing their dominion permanently in 
the land ; and, moreover, it was thought that when vic- 
torious and loaded with plunder, they would return to 
Africa, leaving the land to the conspirators. A short- 
sighted and fatal egotism thus blinded them to the con- 
sequences of their treachery, and laid the foundations 
of seven hundred years of Saracenic rule. 

The plan was executed ; the brothers passed over to 
the enemy. Roderic (in the legend) appears like a ver- 
itable king of melodrama, in a chariot, of ivory, with a 
crown sparkling with jewels, — a fantastic theatre-figure, 
fluttering in purple raiment : he is slain by Taric : he 
vanishes mysteriously, and all that remains of him is 
his white charger, who is found sunk in the mire of the 
river-sedge, while upon the horse's back flashed a sad- 
dle of gold, radiant with precious stones. 

Taric had previously, say the Arabian chroniclers, 
skilfully played upon the imaginations of the impres- 
sionable Berbers, by telling them of a vision he had had 
on the sea, as they were coming ; how the prophet and 
the four Khalifs had appeared to him in a dream, pre- 
dicted victory, and commanded him to treat the Mussul- 
mans with gentleness. Like Corte's, he is said to have 
burnt his ships that there might be no return, and his 
progress through the land is accompanied by graceful and 
impressive visions of the supernatural. 

Rendered thus invincible by a consciousness of the 
favor of Heaven, Taric forgot his orders, did not re- 



64 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

turn to Africa as Mousa had commanded him, and has- 
tened like a true general to take advantage of his vic- 
tory. 

Roderic's defeat and death at once precipitated all 
the loose and disorganized elements in the kingdom 
into crystallization round the invaders. " The serfs 
would not stir for fear they might save their masters 
with them ; " the Jews sprang to arms, and hurried into 
the service of the Mussulmans, and an unspeakable 
confusion prevailed everywhere. Ecija, Elvira, Cor- 
dova, Toledo, fell into the hands of the invaders, amid 
universal dismay of prelate and patrician. But two 
courses remained for the vanquished : salvation by 
flight, or negotiation with the victors. The princes of 
the house of Witica obtained in return for their treachery, 
the three thousand "farms " belonging to the crown do- 
main, and Witica's son was named governor of Toledo. 

A simple raid had- thus become a splendid conquest. 
" God had filled the hearts of the infidels with fear," in- 
deed, said a Mussulman chronicler. 

Meanwhile, Mousa on the other side of the strait, 
foamed with indignation and disappointment: that Taric, 
his lieutenant, and not he himself, should reap all this 
glory, seemed intolerable. But, happily, something still 
remained to be done ; Spain was not all conquered ; 
so hurrying up his troops, he passed the strait in 712, 
with eighteen thousand Arabs, took Medina-Sidonia, 
besieged and took the great city of Seville, then Me- 
rida (713), and went to Toledo to join Taric. "Why 
didst thou march forward without my permission? I 
gave thee orders only to make a foray and then return 



The Story of Mousa. 65 

to Africa ! " cried he, applying the ignominious whip to 
Taric's shoulders. 

The story of Mousa is full of touching legends in- 
vented by the romancers long after his time. Named 
by Abdulaziz, brother of the Khalif, governor of Africa ; 
a Yemenite of illustrious lineage, the conqueror of 
Spain ; he returned from that country gorged with plun- 
der, was recalled to Syria by the Khalif Walid, was ac- 
cused of enormous peculation, stripped of his ill-gotten 
gains, and even condemned to death, though he es- 
caped with his life by the payment of an immense fine. 

The rest of Spain sank under the Arabian rule with- 
out resistance, with the exception of an inconsiderable 
part of the north and north-west. Interest urged to a 
speedy submission, for in this way advantageous treaties 
could be made, whilst opposition was attended by death 
and loss of property. 

The Berber conquest cannot be characterized as a 
great calamity. The anarchy of its commencement was 
soon succeeded by a state of things which the enervated 
population hailed with complacency. The Arab domi- 
nation w r as more tolerable than the Gothic. The con- 
quered people retained their own laws and judges, 
counts and governors ; their agricultural pursuits were 
left undisturbed • the serfs were obliged to till the land 
as before, and to pay the Mussulman proprietor one- 
fifth of the produce, while the state serfs paid a third of 
the produce of what had formerly been the crown lands; 
conquered districts and possessions appertaining to the 
church or to fugitive patricians, were divided among the 
conquerors while the serfs remained on them ; the Chris- 
tian cultivators paid a third of their produce, not to the 



66 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifat e. 

state, but to the Arab feudatories who had been en- 
feoffed with a part of the state domain ; and special 
cities, like Merida, Lorca, Alicante, and Orihuella, ob- 
tained terms of the most honorable kind. In general, 
the Christians retained most of their property, were per- 
mitted to alienate it at will, — a right denied them under 
the Visigoths, — and paid a capitation tax until they 
embraced Islamism. 

To the previous intolerance of the Arian and Catho- 
lic clergy, now succeeded the mild religious sway of the 
Arabs. Nobody was outraged for his religious beliefs ; 
the government did not care that the Christians should 
become Mussulmans, — the treasury lost too much by it ! 
— and the new authority was so much liked by all, that 
Christian revolts became rare ; even the priesthood be- 
came reconciled. Nobody seemed scandalized that 
Egilona, widow of Roderic, should marry (?) Abdulaziz, 
son of Mousa. The conquest was looked upon as a 
blessing in some respects ; it was followed by an impor- 
tant social revolution, and many of the evils under which 
the country had been groaning for centuries, disap- 
peared. 

The power of the privileged classes was, if not an- 
nihilated, at least greatly lessened ; petty proprietorship 
sprang up on an extensive scale, out of the confiscated 
lands which had been divided among great numbers of 
individuals ; agriculture flourished happily under Ara- 
bian protection ; the condition of the servile classes was 
ameliorated ; Islamism was more favorable to the eman- 
cipation of the slaves than Christianity had been. It 
was a command of Mahomet, speaking in the name of 
God, that slaves should be allowed to redeem them- 



Religious Tyranny. 67 

selves, and under Mahometanism it was a meritorious 
act to free them. The conquest furnished both the 
slaves and the serfs of the Christians an opportunity of 
recovering their freedom. Flight to the property of a 
Mussulman, and the utterance there of the magic for- 
mula, "There is but one God and Mahomet is his 
prophet ! " rendered the runaway slave " Allah's freed - 
man." 

The boundless religious tyranny of the Visigoth, 
seems after all, only to have produced superficial im- 
pressions. Pagan Spain had slipped into Catholicism 
with an easy-going conscience. Arian Spain threw off 
the mantle of heterodoxy with ready universality : and 
yet even in the time of the Arabs, Paganism and Christ- 
ianity were still found disputing together, and Christian- 
ity in many localities, merely floated upon the lips 
rather than dwelt in the hearts of many of its followers. 
Hence it is hardly strange that the serfs fell into the 
snare, — abjured their elementary 7 and ill-understood 
Catholicism, and welcomed Mahomet both as spiritual 
guide and personal liberator. Many patricians did the 
same. 

One undoubted evil resulting from the conquest, was 
the shameless frivolity with which the Arabian emirs 
and sultans named the bishops, — often libertines, Jews, 
Mussulmans, steeped in debauchery, — to the vacancies 
in the episcopal body. Gradually, too, they came to view 
the treaties which had been made with less rigor ; a 
gentle and humane domination passed by degrees into an 
intolerable despotism. " We must eat the Christians ; 
and our descendants must eat theirs, as long as Islamism 
lasts." The advice of the Khalif Omar, became 



68 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

the guiding principle of the conquerors of the Peninsu- 
la. The 1-enegades — those who had abjured their relig- 
ion and turned Mahometans — stigmatized as " concealed 
Christians," "sons of slaves," "the adopted," — found 
themselves, in the course of time, in a lamentable pre- 
dicament : they had lost their religious nationality. 

Many of them, despite their conventional conversion, 
were really Christians, but they could no longer return 
to Christianity ; the barrier of an inexorable law stood 
between them and their lost faith. Once "converted," a 
Christian who apostatized suffered death ; and even his 
posterity were Mussulmans in spite of themselves ; they 
suffered for the error of their forefathers. 

Their social position, too, was infamous ; they were ex- 
cluded ordinarily, from remunerative employment, and 
from all participation in the state government ; their 
conversion was discredited j they were all blighted with 
the name of " slave." 

It stands to reason that they could not resign them- 
selves to being treated in this fashion, especially as 
many of the converts were among the wealthiest and 
noblest proprietors of the country, and, as a whole, 
formed a majority of the population. The constraint, 
the disdain, the social inferiority, the narrow insolence 
of their oppressors, converted them into standing rebels, 
and from time to time, in greater or in less numbers, a 
mobilization of the whole renegade population against 
the Mussulmans — a seething cauldron of rebellion bub- 
bling for a hundred and fifty years, frequently assisted 
by the Christians — took place. 

It was only towards the middle of the tenth century 
that Abderaman III. succeeded in fusing the whole mass. 



Irreconcilable Elements. 69 

— Arab, Spanish, Berber, — into a really united nation, 
by the rigor of his inflexible administration. 

A fleeting, not a lingering glance, must now be cast 
upon the internal condition of Spain, up to the time 
of the establishment of the independent kingdom of 
Cordova, (about 755-63) under Abderaman I, the 
founder of the great Omaiyade dynasty in the West. 

The country called by the Arabs " Andalusia," was 
divided up into five provinces, each with its Wall or 
governor, the chief of whom, after Ayub's time, lived 
in Cordova, from whence the whole country was governed. 
Each fortified town had its alcaide, or commandant, and 
cadi, or Moslem judge. 

From the time of Mousa. to the time of the landing 
of Abderaman I, (755), emirs, appointed by the gov- 
ernors of Africa in the name of the Khalif of the East, 
succeeded one another with great rapidity. Though the 
Berbers had conquered the country, the Arabs, under 
Mousa, took immediate possession of the loveliest parts 
of it, and sent their allies, to starve or plunder, into 
the arid plains of Estremadura, La Mancha, Castile, 
and the North. This, together with the arrival of the 
Syrians, odious to the Arabs on account of their relig- 
ious differences, brought together a trinity of irrecon- 
cilable elements, which, added to the Christian moun- 
taineers of the Asturias, the renegades throughout the 
Peninsula, and the Christian population within the Mus- 
sulman jurisdiction, evoked a confusion and conflict 
that lasted for generations. 

The Omaiyades were illustrious nobles of Mecca, 
who, after giving fifteen khalif s to the East, had suc- 
cumbed at the death of the last of the Oriental line, Mer 
wan II, in 750. The Abbaside dynasty, descended from 



70 The Berber Conquest and the Khali fate. 

Abbas, uncle of the prophet, likewise a family of the 
highest rank, had usurped the throne, and endeavored 
to exterminate utterly the whole race of its predeces- 
sors. 

Abderaman, a tall, vigorous, valiant youth, of noble 
mien and princely accomplishments, — an ideal Omai- 
yade in the mingled suavity and inflexibility of his tem- 
per — escaped to Spain, mastered the situation in that 
faction-ridden country with the instinct of a genuine 
man of genius, and throwing off his allegiance to the 
Eastern Khalifate, assumed independent sovereignty. 
It was not however, till 929, that the title Khalif and 
Commander of the Faithful — hitherto out of respect 
applied to him of Damascus and Bagdad only — was 
assumed. Before that time, Sultan, emir, or son of the 
Khalif, was the title of the sovereign of Spain. 

Prior to Abderaman's reign, the only event of memo- 
rable importance that had signalized the Arabic suprem- 
acy, was the great defeat at Tours in France, in 732, at 
which Charles Martel profoundly humbled the Arabs, 
slew their general Abderaman and put an end forever 
to all permanent Semitic settlements on that side of the 
Pyrenees. The moon of Islam continued to flicker, from 
time to time, faintly among the Frankish principalities in 
the south of France, till the year 793, when it seems to 
have been darkened completely by " the yonge sonne " 
of Charlemagne. 

It was in 756 that Abderaman was recognized emir 
of all Spain. Proscribed, tossed about for five years 
amid all the vicissitudes of an adventurous life, wan- 
dering from tribe to tribe in the deserts of Africa, he 
had at length, with the help of his Omaiyade clients be- 
come master of a great country. But his seat on the throne 



Roncesvalles. 71 

was an uneasy one, and his reign of thirty-two years was 
a gladiatorial wrestle, now with the Yemenite sect, to 
whom he had owed his elevation, now with the Berbers, 
and now with the restless tribe of Fihrites. Indefati- 
gably active, at once perfidious and astute, generous 
and implacable, Abderaman came forth victor in all the 
wars he had to wage with his subjects, and his success 
commanded even the admiration of his enemies. It 
was in his days that the famous disaster, so musically 
recounted in the Chanson de Roland, occurred, — the de- 
feat of Roncesvalles. 

Three Arab chiefs, al-Arabi, governor of Barcelona, 
Abderaman-ibn-habib, the Slav — so called on account 
of his tall and slender figure, his flaxen hair, and his 
blue eyes, which recalled the type of that race, several 
of whom were then living in Spain — and Abou-'l-Aswad, 
bore such hatred to Abderaman for the wrongs he had 
done them, that they resolved to implore the help of 
Charlemagne to avenge themselves on him. The world 
was then full of the glory of the exploits of this con- 
queror. The conspirators betook themselves to Pader- 
born, and proposed an alliance against the emir of 
Spain, which Charlemagne did not hesitate to accept ; 
a coalition more formidable than any that had yet im- 
perilled the dominion of Abderaman. Charlemagne 
crossed the Pyrenees and laid siege to Saragossa on 
finding that the inhabitants refused to deliver it into his 
hands, but was unexpectedly recalled to the banks of 
the Rhine on hearing that Wittekind, the dreaded chief 
of the Saxons, had availed himself, of his absence, had 
returned from exile, excited insurrection, and was now 
opposite Cologne with his rebellious countrymen. 



72 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

With all possible speed, Charlemagne hastened back 
over the Pyrenees through the pass of Roncesvalles : 
but while the army was defiling through the long and 
narrow gorge, the Basques, who were bitter foes of the 
Franks, pounced upon the rear-guard of Charlemagne's 
army, encumbered as it was with baggage, hurled the 
soldiers down into the valley, slew them to a man, — 
even Roland, commander of the frontier of Brittany, — 
plundered the baggage train, and then vanished into 
the night as tracelessly as they had come. 

Eventually Abderaman came to be execrated by Arabs 
and Berbers alike ; he quarrelled with his followers, 
and was betrayed by his kinsmen. His solitary walks 
through the streets of Cordova among his people were 
interrupted; isolated, gloomy, and inaccessible, he 
rarely left his palace unless surrounded by a numerous 
guard. A standing army of forty thousand mercenaries 
was established, blindly devoted to his person ; and he 
employed them pitilessly in breaking the backbone of 
the Arabs and Berbers, teaching them obedience, and 
compelling them to contract habits of peace and order. 
His course w r as in exact parallelism with that of the 
kings of the fifteenth century in their efforts to triumph 
over feudalism. A " despotism of the sword " had thus 
been initiated, which was only too conscientiously imi- 
tated by his successors. But these people were other- 
wise ungovernable. Instinct and recollection equally 
called their inharmonious tribes to independence and 
the formation of so many republics ; a monarchical gov- 
ernment was contrary to their nature, and self-govern- 
ment was impossible. 

The eight years of the reign of his son and successor, 



A Cultivated Voluptuary. 73 

Hicham (788-796) were specially colored by the rise 
and spread of a new school of Mahometan theology, 
held in great veneration by the Sultan : the school of 
Malic, founder of one of the four orthodox sects of 
Islamism. Hicham's victories over his rebellious broth- 
ers, Solaiman and Abdallah, and over his Frankish ene- 
mies (793) ; his mildness and munificence ; his pious 
enthusiasm in the building of the great mosque of Cor- 
dova, begun by his father ; his love of science and suc- 
cess in establishing schools of learning, in which even 
Christians were made acquainted with the riches of the 
Arabian intellect ; all this greatly endeared him to his 
people, and paved the way to their giving ready alle- 
giance to his son, Hacam. 

A cultivated voluptuary, " richly organized to enjoy 
life," bright, joyous, passionately devoted to hunting 
and wine-drinking, Hacam roused the insolent ire of the 
faquis of the new school of theology, by refusing to per- 
mit them so great an influence in the affairs of state as 
they wished. They calumniated and denounced him, 
pelted him with stones through their renegade agents 
who swarmed in the capital, and formed a treacherous 
league to dethrone him. Much is said of his blooming 
youth, the brilliance of his glance, his fine form, his 
careful education, and the energy with which he curbed 
the volatile revolutionists of his capital. A famous 
story, too characteristic and too illustrative of the spirit 
of the' times, to be omitted, is told of his procedure 
against the rebels of Toledo. His fifteen-year old son, 
Abderaman, gained admittance to the castle, caused 
elaborate preparations lor a feast to be made, and had 
invitations sent to from seven hundred to five thousand 



74 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

(accounts are conflicting) of the principal inhabitants 
of the place. The guests, arriving one by one, were 
admitted and led to a fosse, where their heads, for a 
series of horrible hours, were struck off one after the 
other. The people, noticing the disappearance of the 
guests and their failure to return, thought they must 
have sallied forth by another door. " It is strange ! " 
said a physician, " I have been at the other door, and I 
waited there some time, but I saw nobody come out." 
Then, noticing attentively vapor rising above the walls, 
" Wretched creatures ! " cried he, " that is not the 
smoke of a feast they are preparing ; it is the blood of 
our slain brethren ! " 

Wearied with perpetual conspiracies and revolutions, 
Hacam, like his grandfather, shut himself up in his 
palace, wasted his youth in unworthy voluptuousness 
and drink, and became such a monster of cruelty that he 
caused a populous suburb of Cordova to be set in 
flames, forced thousands to go into exile to Fez and 
Alexandria, and in his old age, expiated hjb, guilt by 
profound melancholy and madness. Music and verse 
alone gave him any solace. He surrounded himself with 
mamelukes, who were called mutes because they were 
negroes or slaves who could not speak Arabic. These 
terrible and inexorable fiends, unable even to under- 
stand the prayer of their victims, throttled the Cordo- 
vans by hundreds at the moment of the burning of the 
suburb. 

A true Arab, Hacam sovereignly hated the people of 
the country, whereas, towards those of his own caste he 
was disgracefully partial. His death in 822, rid the 
land of an Arabian Caligula. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE BERBER CONQUEST AND THE KHALIFATE. 
[continued.] 

Abderaman II. one of Hacam's forty sons, and his 
successor, made the court of the sultans of Spain more 
brilliant than il had ever been. He rivalled the sump- 
tuousness and prodigality of the Khalifs of Bagdad, 
embellished the capital, built mosques, bridges, and 
palaces at vast expense, and constructed magnificent 
gardens which were irrigated by the mountain streams 
of the vicinity. A poet himself, like so many of these 
accomplished princes, he recompensed other poets 
munificently : gentle and affable, he did not even punish 
the thefts he saw committed in his palace with his own 
eyes ; and he is celebrated for the quadruple tyranny 
exercised over him by a faqui, a musician, a woman, 
and an eunuch. 

The faqui was the Berber Tahya, a fierce, impetuous, 
and bitter-tempered fanatic, who had instigated the St. 
Bartholomew of the suburb. He was revered by the 
monarch, who had delivered up to him the government 
of the church and the superintendence of the depart- 
ment of justice. 

Ziry^b, the charming Eastern musician from Bagdad, 
who had enchanted the ear of Haroun-ar-Rachid, who 



76 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

heard the genies singing in his sleep — an inimitable 
improvisatore and connoisseur in all the arts and sci- 
ences of the day, even astronomy and geography ; who 
knew 10,000 songs by heart, and whose sparkling con- 
versation, grace, and elegance were the talk of his time, 
the model of Arabian " bon ton," supremely distin- 
guished in manners and knowledge — Ziryab became 
the social legislator of Spain, introduced innumerable 
innovations in manners, and lived in the completest in- 
timacy — signed and sealed by hundreds and thousands 
of gold pieces in gifts and pensions — with his master. 
The long-haired Mussulmans with the hair parted in the 
ni iddle, had to cut their raven locks short ; golden and 
si Iver vases and linen tablecloths, gave way to crystal 
aid leather; the various array of the season was pre- 
scribed by this dictator; he convinced the Arabian 
S paniards of the excellency of asparagus ; dishes of 
many curious kinds took his name, and the celebrity of 
the graceful Epicurean lived to the latest Mussulman 
times, side by side with that of illustrious savants, poets, 
generals, ministers, and princes. 

The Sultana Taroub and the Eunuch Nacr completed 
this singular quartette. Taroub's affections were fixed 
on bags of silver and necklaces of fabulous price. 
Nagr was a cruel and pale-hearted apostate, of Spanish 
birth, who ground the Christians with fiendish gayety, 
and reigned supreme . with his mistress within the 
palace. 

Stubborn insurrections broke out in Merida and 
Toledo ; in 843 the coast of Spain was ravaged by the 
Norman sea-robbers, probably for the first time, and in 




HARRO OF SALAMANCA. 



Abderaman. 79 

844 they even sailed up the Guadalquivir to Seville, 
robbed, burned, plundered, and fled. 

An extraordinary drought scourged the whole land in 
846, followed by countless locusts, a famine, and great 
suffering ; but the people of the capital at least were 
kept quiet by being employed in constructing numbers 
of fountains and marble baths, paving the streets, rear- 
ing the superb palaces of Merwan and Moghais, and 
bringing the mountain - water to Cordova in leaden 
pipes. Bitter religious strifes and controversies, precip- 
itated by the passion of the Christians for martyrdom, 
and embittered by the intolerance of Tahya, raged in 
the capital. 

The poet, warrior, general, and scholar, Abderaman 
II. died in 852 in the odor of love and philanthropy. 
The old monarch, according to Eulogius, had mounted 
to the terrace of his palace, when his eye fell on the 
gibbets to which were dangling the mutilated corpses of 
the last Christian martyrs ; he gave orders for them to 
be burned, but scarcely had the order been given when 
an attack of apoplexy seized him, and he expired in the 
night. 

Mohammed, one of his forty-five sons, — a frigid and 
heartless egotist, — succeeded him. " Descendant of the 
Khalifs," cried his favorite, Hachim, "how beautiful 
would this world be if there were no death ! ■" " What 
an absurd idea ! " replied Mohammed; "If there were 
no death, should I be reigning ? Death is a good 
thing ; my predecessor is dead, that is why I reign ! " 

This prince was universally scorned and hated for his 
niggardliness ; he even cheated the employees of the 
treasury out of two pence when he once had to examine 



80 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

an account running up to one hundred thousand gold 
pieces. The roads became infested with brigands, so 
that even the already infrequent communications be- 
tween the cities had to be kept up by caravans banded 
together for mutual defence ; martyrdoms increased, 
though the attitude of the enlightened Mahometans 
towards these misguided fanatics was one of pity, as 
towards demoniacs bereft of their senses ; the Chris- 
tians and renegades of the mountains of Regio raised 
a formidable revolt, echoed all over the peninsula ; the 
bright almond groves and cherry orchards, the gardens 
of citron, pomegranate, apples, and pears, — romantic 
Andalusia, with its fields filled with the gold of wheat 
and the emerald of hemp, threaded by the silver of 
innumerable rivulets cleaving the noble mountains and 
plains of Ronda and Malaga, — became a bloody bat- 
tle-ground between Saracen and Spaniard. The north 
was free and in league against the Sultan. 

In 879 emeutes and insurrections were ablaze in 
many places, especially in Regio. The Christians of 
Galicia and Navarre, the Normans in sixty ships (866) 
destroying lighthouses and mosques along the coast ; 
Alfonso III. of the Asturias in his expeditions ; finally 
the great rebellion of Omar-ibn-Hafcoun, shook the 
kingdom of Cordova to its foundations, and menaced it 
with total overthrow, In a short time Omar ceased to 
be a robber chieftain and gathered about him a sort of 
effulgence as chief of the whole discontented Spanish 
population of the South. He became the real king of 
Andalusia. 

Mohammed's death in 886 extended Omar's dominion, 
and the death of his successor and son, Mondhir, — 



Seville. 81 

said to be one of a hundred sons, — slain by a poisoned 
lancet (888) two years afterward, brought about a state 
of things perilous in the extreme. 

His brother Abdallah — who supremely scorned "the 
people that rang bells and adored crosses " — came into 
possession of a state suffering from almost fatal debility. 
Already it seemed on the point of ruin and decomposi- 
tion. Ibn-Hafcoun and his insurgent mountaineers 
were but a part of the evil ; the Arab aristocracy had 
begun to rise and assert its independence ; a power 
more dreadful to the monarchical principle than the 
Spaniards themselves. Secret apostacy from Mahomet- 
anism had gone on increasing under the reigns of Ab- 
deraman II. and Mohammed, and added a new element 
of danger ; counterbalanced to some extent by wholesale 
" conversion " in various parts of the land. There was 
no sympathy between the Arabs of the provinces, mostly 
descended from the soldiers of Damascus, and the 
" vile canaille " as they termed both Mussulman and 
Christian Spaniards. The first Alhambra became a 
majestic ruin in the savage combats between Sanwar 
and the allies of Ibn-Hafcoun. Seville, the seat of 
Roman science and civilization, the lamp of the Visi- 
goths, the glory of Spain, surrounded by a delightful 
circle of figs and olives through which the tranquil 
Guadalquivir traced a line of inexhaustible fertility, 
was the scene of an abominable massacre, which few of 
its Spanish population survived ; and we are told that 
in the seignorial manors of the neighborhood, the im- 
provisatores in the evenings long continued to celebrate 
in solemn chant their remembrances of this sombre 
drama. Bread had become enormously dear ; com- 



82 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate, 

merce was annihilated ; nobody believed in the future ; 
discouragement was universal. The sultan, seated on 
a throne which he owed to a fratricide, had found it a 
bed of thorns. In the fourth year of his reign (891), 
nearly all of Mussulman Spain had freed itself from 
his sway; every Arab, Berber, or Spanish lord had 
appropriated for himself some part of the heritage of 
the Omaiyades ; the treasury was empty; Abdallah was 
pusillanimous ; Ibn-Hafcoun was intriguing with Bag- 
dad that he might obtain recognition as sultan ; and 
even after his great defeat at Polei (891), he seemed 
invincible. This victory and the reconciliation of the 
sultan with the powerful Sevillian chieftain, Ibn-Hadd- 
jadj, previously in revolt, proved Abdallah's salvation, 
and were the beginning of a re-establishment of the 
royal power. 

Ibn-Haddjadj was a singularly interesting type of the 
tributary Arabian prince. Within his own domain his 
power was unlimited ; he had his own army ; he named 
all the officials of Seville, from cadi and chief of police 
down to the least official ; he kept up royal state ; 
maintained an aulic council, and a body-guard of five 
hundred gentlemen ; he wore a mantle of brocade, on 
which his names and titles were embroidered in letters 
of gold, and while unsparingly severe towards malefac- 
tors, maintained order with firmness. A prince and a 
merchant, a friend of art and literature, he " received, in 
the same vessels, presents from distant princes and tis- 
sues from Egypt, scholars from Arabia, and dancing- 
women from Bagdad." The poets of Spain flocked to 
his court, and with bitter accent contrasted his magnifi- 
cence with the meanness of Abdallah. 



Abderaman. III. 83 

The arms of the sultan, dating from this victory and 
his reconciliation with Ibn-Haddjadj, were constantly 
victorious in the south, till his death in 912. 

As there was no settled succession to the throne, and 
as it was the custom to fill a vacancy by choosing the 
eldest son or the ablest relative of the deceased sultan, 
fears were entertained that the numerous uncles and 
grand-uncles might dispute the succession with Abdera- 
man, grand-son of Abdallah and presumptive heir. 
Abderaman was son of the wretched Mohammed, who 
was murdered by his own brother, by order of his 
father, Abdallah. 

The new king, however, contrary to all expectation, 
found no opposition to his elevation, and mounted 
the throne, as the third of the name, amid general joy 
and satisfaction. Abdall all's own eleven sons were 
thus excluded. 

A great, blue-eyed, light-complexioned, nobly-formed 
youth, as his grandfather had been in his younger clays, 
Abderaman had been educated with particular care ; he 
was the idol of his grandfather's old age, though his 
own frank and audacious character was the exact oppo- 
site of the circumspect and tortuous Abdallah's. 

To a period of profound demoralization, anarchy, 
and civil war, now succeeded, under his commanding- 
genius, comparative order and concord. The Arab aris- 
tocracy had lost its proudest chieftains. A weaker 
generation, to whom the grievances, pride, passions, 
and energy of the preceding were unknown, had grown 
up. Blazing villages and ruined plantations, fantastic 
cruelties of brigands nested in crenellated towers that 
kissed the clouds, and the maintenance of a conflict 



84 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

which, from national, had narrowed into a mere clash 
of hostile and mutually repugnant faiths, seemed no 
longer worth admiring or worth maintaining. The gates 
of the insurgent cities opened as by magic, before the 
young and brilliant monarch, the fame of whose clem- 
ency and intelligence, soon made his people forget the 
old sultan, — the monstrous misanthrope — who had poi- 
soned two of his own brothers, caused a third to be ex- 
ecuted, and slain two of his sons on simple suspicions 
and without a trial. He conducted himself with the 
utmost rectitude towards the Christians of his capital, 
His great antagonist, the Spanish hero Ibn-Hafcoun, 
after thirty years of warfare against the invaders of his 
fatherland, died unconquered in 917, two years after a 
horrible famine when the people of Cordova died of 
starvation by thousands. 

By 930, Toledo, which had maintained its independ- 
ence for eighty years, alone remained to be taken, to 
complete Abderaman's possession of the heritage of 
his ancestors. After a two years' siege, it fell ; Arabs, 
Spaniards, and Berbers bowed the knee before the 
power of the crown ; and the principle of unlimited 
monarchy was proclaimed amid universal silence. A 
period of " administrative despotism " set in ■ the 
ancient traditions of the people — their reminiscences 
of the absolute dominion of the Romans and Visigoths 
— were rehabilitated ; class distinctions tended to dis- 
appear ; and Abderaman III. became the mighty amal- 
gamator — the Oriental magician — who harmonized 
the glaring discords of creed and race and proved him- 
self incontestably the greatest of the Omaiyade Arabian 
monarchs of Spain. 



"Everybody Clean." 35 

In fact, Abderaman had accomplished wonders ; an 
empire delivered up to the anarchy of civil war, torn by 
factions, parcelled out among a throng of lords of vari- 
ous race, exposed to the continual raids of the Chris- 
tians of the north, on the eve of being swallowed up by 
the people of Leon or the Fatimide fanatics of Africa, 
had been saved both from itself and from foreign dom- 
ination, had come forth greater than ever, had entered 
upon a period of prosperity and order, respected alike 
at home and abroad. The treasury was overflowing ■ 
millions of gold pieces filled the state coffers (951) ; and 
Abderaman came to pass for one of the richest sover- 
eigns in the world, /Agriculture, commerce, arts, sci- 
ences, industry, a wonderful system of irrigation with 
its co-ordinate branches and industries, flourished as 
they had never flourished before. A vigilant police 
made every spot accessible with safety ; fruits and provi- 
sions were astonishingly low ; " everybody rode, every- 
body was clean," Such is the account of an Arabian 
traveller. 

Cordova in this reign numbered five hundred thou- 
sand inhabitants, three thousand mosques, one hundred 
and thirteen thousand houses, and twenty-eight suburbs ; 
and the beauty and splendor of its appearance rivalled 
that of Bagdad the noble capital of the Abbasides. It 
was named and known in the heart of Germany. In 936, 
the foundations of a splendid city, bearing the name of 
the favorite concubine, Zahra, were laid near the capital, 
to be paid for out of money bequeathed by another of 
the Khalifs women. For twenty-five years, ten thou- 
sand workmen, assisted by fourteen hundred sumpter- 
mules and four hundred camels, did everything to ren- 



86 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

tier it an incomparable dwelling-place ; a premium of 
four hundred dirhemswas promised to whomsoever should 
settle there ; the palace of the Khalif , filled with the. mar- 
vels of the east and west, rose in enormous proportions 
for the maintenance of a harem of six thousand women. 

An admirable navy permitted Abderaman to dispute 
with the Fatimides the supremacy of the Mediterranean, 
and guaranteed to him the possession of the key of 
Mauritania, Ceuta. A numerous and well-disciplined 
army gave him a preponderance over the discordant 
Christians of the North. The emperor of Constanti- 
nople, the kings of Germany, Italy, and France, sent 
ambassadors to his court. 

So many glorious results give evidence of a quiet 
and powerful intelligence which nothing escaped, which 
united delicacy of detail with sublimity of conception ; 
whose power of sagacious centralization was almost 
unlimited ; whose steady equipoise amid so much tu- 
mult, whose broad tolerance in calling men of an alien 
faith to its councils, were equally remarkable. 

His son, Hacam II., who assumed the sovereignty 
after the death of Abderaman, was an accomplished 
savant. He was possessed by a passion for rare 
and precious books. Cairo, Bagdad, Damascus, were 
ransacked to fill his libraries ; he had agents every- 
where, copying or purchasing for him ancient and mod- 
ern books, at whatever price. His palace was a library 
and a workshop in which copyists, binders, illuminators 
abounded. The catalogue alone consisted of forty-four 
volumes, and the books, according to some, numbered 
four hundred thousand, all of which Hacam was said 
to have read and annotated. ! His authority in literary 




A SERENATA AT CORDOVA 



A Literary Monarch. 80 

history was absolute among the Andalusians, and Per- 
sian and Syrian authors were equally known to him, 
even long before any one else had seen or read them. 
Under his auspices, Abou-'l-Farad prepared his mag- 
nificent work on the Arab poets and singers. His 
court was the focus of an intense intellectual activity. 
Primary schools flourished in his capital ; nearly every- 
body in Andalusia could read or write, when persons 
even of the highest rank elsewhere in Christian Europe 
were grossly ignorant. Grammar and rhetoric were 
taught in the schools ; Hacam himself founded twenty- 
seven schools in the capital for poor children, who re- 
ceived their education gratuitously. The great univer- 
sity of Cordova, frequented by thousands of students, 
had a world-wide celebrity and a host of distinguished 
teachers discoursed eloquently in the great mosque — 
used for the lectures — on theology and jurisprudence, 
on the traditions of Mahometanism and the poetry, 
proverbs, and language of the Arabians. 

Hacam's short reign of fifteen years ended unevent- 
fully in 976, when he expired in the arms of his two 
chief eunuchs Fayic and Djaudhar, leaving one son 
Hicham, behind. 

The remaining years of this century (976-1002), how- 
ever, are occupied not with Hicham, but with his cele- 
brated vizier, Almansor, the great adversary of the 
Christians, the desecrator of the famous mediaeval 
shrine of Compostella in Galicia, the destroyer of Pam- 
pelona, Leon, and Barcelona; an Arab who almost 
annihilated Christianity in Spain, humbled the pride of 
the servants of Christ, and scattered the treasures of 
the church, accumulated for ages, to the winds. Of 



90 The Berber Conquest arid the Khalifate. 

his death, in 1002, a monk chronicles laconically: 
"In the year 1002 died Almanzor; he was buried in 
hell." The terror of his enemies, he was the idol of 
his soldiers ; even the horses, says an Arabian author, 
seemed to understand their duty ; it was seldom they 
were heard to whinny. 

Almansor surpassed even Abderaman in power j his 
spirit was luminously practical, and delighted in projects 
for the amelioration of communications through the 
country, — bridge-building, opening of highways, and 
the like. His justice and fortitude — where his ambi- 
tion was not concerned — were proverbial. During a 
sitting of the grand council on one occasion, he had 
his foot cauterized, while conversing tranquilly with his 
associates, who perceived the operation only by the 
odor of the burning flesh. Political considerations 
forced Almansor not to tolerate philosophers, though 
he pensioned poets in numbers. A superbly handsome, 
ambitious, and gifted student, he had risen by the favor 
of the Sultana Aurora to the highest position, and from 
the beginning, absorbed in the perusal of the ancient 
chronicles of his race, he foresaw, with the divination of 
srenius, that he was to be an illustrious successor to the 
heroes they commemorated, He was major-domo of 
the palace at the time of Hacam's death, and for many 
years retained his own name Abou-Amir Mohammed, 
(Ibn-abi-Amir), before the assumption of the one by 
which he is generally known to history. He became 
Hadjib, or prime minister, overawed the young Khalif 
by his commanding abilities, and, it is said, caused him 
to decay prematurely by encouraging him in unbounded 
license. 



A Wretched Figure-Head. 91 

Thus Hicham became a wretched figure-head, whose 
life was a perpetual torment and dread, who was gor- 
geously incarcerated in his own palace, and whose 
debauched sensibilities seemed at length capable of no 
emotion but fear. He was taken to the grand villa-city 
of Zahira, newly built on the Guadalquivir, where he 
might be kept from influences alien to Almansor's inter- 
ests, and where his reading of the Koran, his fasting, 
prayers, and debaucheries might be uninterrupted. At 
length it was even forbidden to pronounce his name. 

We find Almansor reforming the military organiza- 
tion, calling in hosts of Berbers, and enrolling numbers of 
impoverished Castilians, Navarrese, and Leonese, whom 
he treated with infinite tact. He destroyed the ancient 
tribal division prevalent among his countrymen ; at- 
tacked and slew his father-in-law, Ghalib (981), com- 
mander-in chief of the forces, who had taken up arms 
in defence of the Khalif ; was victorious on every side 
over the king of Navarre, Garcia Fernandez, Count of 
Castile, and Ramiro III. of Leon ; and at the same 
time assumed one of those surnames previously borne 
by Khalif s alone, Almansor billah, " aided by God," 
"victorious by the help of God," by which he was 
henceforth known. On one of his expeditions against 
the Christians, in 985, he carried forty poets to chant 
his victories, and returned covered with the glory of 
having burned Barcelona. 

Insatiable of conquest, he darted upon the Christian 
principalities with the ferocity of a tiger, demolishing, 
plundering, devastating all before him. Yet he did not 
scorn himself to ply the trowel, saw, or pick-axe, when 
he began to extend and beautify the great mosque of 



92 The Berber Conquest and the Rhalifate. 

Cordova ; and did things so nobly and grandly that he 
excited raptures in his contemporaries. He slew his 
own son, the brave and brilliant Abdallah, — a sparkling 
impersonation of Andalusian gayety and Arabian knight- 
hood, — when he discovered that he was conspiring 
against him. 

" Never has an unfortunate implored thy pity in 
vain," sang a poet of him ; "thy bounties and thy bene- 
fits are innumerable as the drops of rain." Like others 
of his race, he doubtless had his slaves with their 
names derived from jewels, and his concubines, who, 
Arabian-fashion, delighted in the names of men. 

Usurping successively the titles of Saiyid (lord) and 
melic carim (noble king), reigning virtually for twenty 
years, he now (996), aspired to reign actually. The 
princes of the blood were either dead, in exile, or in 
misery ; his army, composed of a mosaic of varying 
blood and kindred, were devoted to him ; Hicham, sur- 
rounded by the women of his seraglio, or going forth 
only with his head enveloped in a huge burnous, was a 
cipher. Everything seemed favorable. Yet the people 
loved Hicham ; they hung affectionately, and with all 
the inclining conservatism of the Arabian nature, to the 
reigning dynasty; and despite the glory and prosperity 
which he had brought to the country, they murmured 
ominously at Almansor's arrogance. More powerful 
and implacable than all, Aurora — his Sultana-mistress, 
as some called her — turned against him. Almansor 
could not be Khalif — he could only remain the invin- 
cible vizier who suspended as lamps in the roof of the 
mosque of Cordova, the bells taken from the sanctuary 
of St. James of Compostella (save the eternal city, the 



A /Superstitious Monarch. 93 

most renowned of the sanctuaries of the tenth century) • 
who overthrew the power of Zirri in Mauritania; and 
whose last act almost was the destruction of the shrine 
of St. Emilian, patron saint of Castile. 

Suffering with an excruciating malady, he exclaimed, 
" Twenty thousand soldiers are inscribed upon my roll, 
but there is not one among them so miserable as I." 
Becoming superstitious in his old age, he carefully 
shook off and preserved the dust from the clothes which 
he used in his expeditions, because the Koran said that 
God will preserve from fire him whose feet are covered 
with the dust of the holy wars ; and he gave directions 
that he should be covered with this dust at his death. 
His fifty campaigns against the Christians provided him 
amply with the sacred talisman. Worn to a spectre by 
suffering, he passed away in August, 1002. 

Six years after (1008), Modhaffar his son, who ruled 
the kingdom as his father had done, died ; he was suc- 
ceeded by his brother Abderaman, hated for the Span- 
ish blood that flowed in his veins — he was grandson of 
the count of Castile or the king of Navarre — and sus- 
pected of having poisoned Modhaffer by offering him half 
of an apple cut with a knife poisoned on one side. The 
unpoisoned half he is said to have eaten himself. 

The desire for the downfall of the Amirides — the 
family of Almansor, whose representative Abderaman 
was now — became universal, and the more intense after 
Abderaman had prevailed upon the imbecile Hicham to 
declare him heir to the throne. He even affected the 
characteristic coiffure of the turban which in Spain 
belonged exclusively to the lawyers and theologians; 
an outrage against religion and its ministers. 



94 The Berber Conquest and the Khalifate. 

His power crumbled at a touch; Mohammed, great- 
grandson of Abderaman III., headed a rebellion which, 
in twenty-four hours, annihilated the power of the Ami- 
rides. The sumptuous fairy-land of the villa-city of 
Zahira was set on fire and reduced to ashes, after mil- 
lions of gold and silver had been rifled from it. Ab- 
deraman — Sanchal as he is called — horribly expiated 
his crimes by indignities of every sort. " Behold 
Sanchal the Lucky ! " shrieked a public crier, pointing 
to the hideous remains of the usurper nailed to a cross 
near the palace gate. 

A period of anarchy ensued. 

The Berbers and Castilians pillaged Cordova (1009) 
and Mahdi (Mohammed) was unable to lay the 
demon of democracy which he had called up in his 
efforts to ruin Sanchal. Lifted to the throne by a con- 
spiracy, while Hicham — the everlasting Jew of these 
never-ending revolutions — was still alive, he lay sword- 
siain at Hicham's feet by another conspiracy (1010) 
instigated by the Slavs — a general name for foreigners 
of French, German, and Spanish nationality, either 
captured in war and utilized as soldiers and eunuchs, 
or sold to the Saracens by the trans-Pyreneean powers 
who had captured them in their expeditions. The 
Slavs, who ruled in several provinces, now became all 
powerful, and the Mussulman empire in their hands, a 
prey to civil war, went gradually to pieces. Cordova, 
thronged with thousands of workingmen, filled with 
inflammable material of every sort, the seat of an 
ancient aristocracy whose power had now passed away, 
abounding in wild-haired fanatics, Christians and Jews 
side by side with whom stood crowds of sceptical and 



Dissolution of the Khalifate. 95 

philosophic Arabs, who believed nothing unless it could 
be mathematically proved — Cordova gathered as in a 
burning glass all the uneasy intelligences of the country, 
all the growling discontent, all the fantasts and dream- 
ers, who longed for democracy and radiated their revo- 
lutionary tendencies from its khans throughout the 
peninsula. 

The glorious residence of Zahra, whose reputation 
was European, was razed to the ground ; the glorious 
library of Hacam II., was sold to fill the exhausted 
treasure-chests of the state. Massacres at Cordova and 
elsewhere (1013), followed in the train of the Berbers 
whom Abderaman III. and Almansor had called into 
the land. The dissolution of the Khalifate, the splen- 
did monument of a hundred years of lofty civilization, 
conquest, and culture, ushered in the new Khalif, the 
Berber Solaiman, whose sway extended to five cities 
(Cordova, Seville, Niebla, Ocsonaba, and Beja) alone, 
while the rest became independent under Slav or Ber- 
ber chieftains. Whether Hicham II. still lived or not 
was doubtful, but the S/vas continued to fight in his 
name. The women of his palace asserted that he had 
escaped to Asia. 

Solaiman's enjoyment of power was of brief dura- 
tion, for he was assassinated by the Berberized descend- 
ant of the prophet's son-in-law, Ali-ibn-Hammoud, 
governor of Ceuta and Tangier, who, though he 
scarcely understood the songs of the Arabians sung to 
him, favored the Andalusians in the beginning, but 
swore in the end to destroy their capital and extermi- 
nate its inhabitants. 

His death in a bath in 1018, at the hands of three 



96 The Berber Conquest and the Khalif ate. 

slaves, freed the country from the realization of his 
threats. 

During the next ten or twelve years, Khalifs and 
combinations succeeded one another with dizzying 
rapidity. The Khalifate, accelerating in its downward 
incline, rushed to its destruction with a velocity that 
was irresistible, and when it reached the end, shattered 
into a dozen fragments — republics, at Cordova and 
Seville, petty sovereignties in the East and South. 

Abderaman IV. Mortadha, raised to the throne by 
Mondhir, governor of Saragossa and the Slav Khairan, 
a former ally of Ali, reestablished for a while, as great- 
grandson of Abderaman III., the ancient dynasty of 
the Omaiyades. He was soon killed by the emissaries 
of Khairan, since he was found too proud and spirited 
for the Slav's manipulation. The Berbers were hence- 
forth masters of Andalusia. 

The Cordovans (1023) now chose a son of Abdera- 
man IV. as Khalif, who took the title of fifth of that 
name — a Khalif of seven weeks. He fell by the 
hands of Mohammed (1024), one of the still numerous 
Oiuaiyade connection. His brief reign was memorable 
for his selection of Ibn-Hazin as vizier, the greatest 
scholar of his time, and the most productive writer 
Spain has ever produced. A graceful and exquisite 
poet, full of delicate gallantry and enthusiasm, "the 
chastest and most Christian " of Mussulman singers, 
an Arabized Spaniard, whose purity, delicacy, and spir- 
ituality sprinkled, as with a perfume, everything they 
touched, he fell from his lofty height, a guiltless Lucifer, 
leaving behind him in the Arabian annals a train of 

light 



The End of the Kingdom of Cordova. 97 

Mohammed III., a guilt}', vulgar, and inept assassin, 
was poisoned by an officer, after a short reign full of 
humiliations, and Cordova was for six months without a 
monarch. Then the people resolved to give the throne 
to a brother of Abderaman IV., Hicham III., (1027), a 
stingy, mumbling, and ridiculous old man, whose deity 
was a good digestion, who stammered with embarrass- 
ment at his own receptions, and who crawled out of 
Cordova, covered with ignominy and shame, when his 
viziers, loathing his imbecility, published a manifesto 
to the Cordovans, abolishing the Khalifate in perpetuity. 

Thus ended the kingdom of Cordova. Wrought out 
of many heterogeneous elements — - snatched from the 
hand of the emissaries of the Khalif of the East in 755, 
by Abderaman I., elevated to a Khalifate under Abder- 
aman III., in 929, its existence of nearly 300 years had 
been illustrated by great intellectual brilliance and 
innumerable vicissitudes. Cordova had become a city 
of sanctuaries and pilgrimages like. Mecca and Medina. 
On the rude foundations of the Visigoths, whose rule 
from this distance seemed an incredible episode in 
Spanish history, so utterly had names, dynasties, and 
associations changed, had risen a race at once fierce 
and ethereal-tempered, poetic and sanguinary, polished 
and unscrupulous, who built fairy Alhambras, filled 
centuries with their music, and drowned cities in their 
blood. The Khalifate was a century-plant that bloomed 
once in a hundred years, and then fell into hopeless 
decay. Xeres de la frontera was avenged. 



CHAPTER V. 
SPAIN UNDER THE OMAIYADES. 

IMMOBILITY has been truly said to be the distinct 
characteristic of the swarming tribes that traverse 
the arid deserts of Arabia with their tents and flocks. 
What they were yesterday, — last year, centuries ago — 
they are to-day, and will be to-morrow. The best com- 
mentaries on Arabian history and poetry of the times of 
Mahomet, are the travellers' stories, — Burckhardt's and 
Burton's descriptions of the Bedouins of to-day, un- 
changed in their manners, customs, and modes of thought 
since the Hegira. Intelligence, energy, poetic suscepti- 
bility, abound among these people ; but they do not wish 
to advance in civilization, to ameliorate their condition, to 
reform and revolutionize their immemorial code. Why 
should they ? " The Bedouin is the freest man on earth ; " 
he dispenses with government • his tribe are all broth- 
ers, free, equal, and sympathetic ; and the chief is 
simply a commoner, exalted to that rank because he is 
stronger, braver, wealthier than the rest. All wear the 
same clothing, eat the same food, scorn the same money, 
live together on the booty of the day, and exemplify a 
philosophy of unconscious self-abnegation that is full of 
elements of grandeur. " Wealth comes in the morning 
and goes in the evening," says an Arab poet. His 
camels and his horses — no inch of soil enamelled by 



The Arabian Character. ' 99 

the many-colored products of a refined agriculture — 
are his sole possession. 

Equal among themselves, the Arabs esteem them- 
selves infinitely superior to the toiler in the field, the 
artisan in his workshop, or the man of another race. 
Hospitality, gallantry, courtesy, poetic talent, spoken 
eloquence, are with them beyond mere ancestry ; the 
"kings of the desert," as the Khalif Omar said, "are 
the orators and poets," while the dismal degeneracy of 
the human race comes out luminously in those who do 
not practice the Bedouin virtues." " Perfect " was the 
name formerly given to him who — being a Bedouin — 
harmonized with the poet's gift the virtues of valor, 
liberality, knowledge of writing, swimming, and bending 
the bow. 

A noble origin — the memory of great men enshrined 
in pathetic and worshipping recollections — holds a 
great place with these simple folk ; and before the 
advent of Islamism he was considered especially hon- 
orable, whose father, grandfather, and great-grandfather 
held successively the chiefship of his tribe. The Be- 
douin virtues thus became hereditary in certain families ; 
these families were full of distinguished men ; and the 
position they occupied got to be correspondingly lofty. 

" Son of my brother," is the title which an old Be- 
douin will give to a young one ; the two will live or die 
for each other, resent affronts to either as indignities 
to both, kill the last lamb for the sustenance of a friend, 
and are filled with a profound and unperishing affection 
for the men of their tribe. " Love your tribe," says one 
of their poets, "for you are attached to it by bonds 
stronger than those between a husband and a wife ! " 



L.ofC. 



100' Spain under the Omaiyades. 

Contentment with his lot, hatred of change and 
amelioration, love of tranquillity, gayety, a careless and 
reverie-steeped life, such are the traits of the Bedouin 
as distinguished from our eternal restlessness, our as- 
piration after the infinite, our feverish and illusion- 
haunted existence, and progress in the direction of a 
clear, subtle, and thousand-hued civilization. The 
sphinx, the unchanging Koran, the immeasurable des- 
ert, are his symbols ; motionless serenity is his ideal ■ 
lack of imagination, in its rich and comprehensive 
sense, is his cardinal defect. 

Impetuous, fiery in their passions, the Arabs are the 
least inventive of nations. Mythology they had none, 
though the Kaaba of Mecca, with its mystical black 
stone, was filled with hundreds of representations of the 
heavenly bodies which they worshipped. The monothe- 
istic religion of Mahomet was simply a compound of the 
existing systems and habitudes : paganism and Judaism 
blended in its ceremonial; reason was deified in its rec- 
ognition of one God, and its exclusion of the supernat- 
ural • plastic art and physical manifestation were equally 
remote from its purified and colorless syllabus of reli- 
gious principles. Realism predominates in the unin- 
ventive literature of the Arabians. Epic and dramatic 
poems — the great field of the supernatural with oilier 
races — are wanting with them; their narrative poetiy 
is very defective ; their descriptive power is confined 
to themselves and their own experiences ; ideality is 
entirely banished from their over-heated brains, while 
an infinite expatiation through lyric and subjective 
moods, an endless variation on emotional and sensual 
istic themes, is the key-note of their voluminous verse 



The Arabian Character. 101 

If an imaginative tale of supposed Arabian origin, dis- 
plays inventive power, this fact points like the needle to 
an Indian or Persian source. The Arabian Nights — 
that charming creation of some Bagdad story-teller of 
the eleventh century, possibly even of Greek origin — 
is Arabian only in those parts which reproduce real life 
and sparkle with anecdotes gathered from it. In science 
there is the same lack of creative power ; admirable 
translators and commentators on the ancients, astute 
observers where they have had a leader, they have done 
little that is original. Development and progress can- 
not go hand in hand with so impassioned a yearning 
after personal independence and reserve as they show ; 
they have no political spirit, no consciousness of broad, 
socialistic instinct. They came to Spain, despite the 
enormous successes of the Mussulman arms, essentially 
the sons of the desert ; an aggregation of tribes ready 
to pursue to the death their ancient feuds ; unrefreshed 
and unenlightened by their vast travels, with the dust 
of Damascus, Persia, and the Indies on their feet ; a race 
captive to hereditary prejudices, and ready to fight out, 
on the soil of Spain, the accumulated hates and grudges 
of hundreds of years. 

Such was the character of the multitude of pagan tribes 
that peopled Arabia before their conversion from Sabae- 
anism to Mahometanism. Arabia, itself too poor to 
attract a foreign subjugator, set in motion by a religious 
fanatic, sent forth an array of generals, who soon planted 
the green banner of Islam from the Ganges to the 
Tagus, from the Iaxartes to the Niger. 

And nothing is more remarkable than Mahomet's 
success, A nervous, delicate, impressionable constitu- 



102 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

tion inherited from his mother, cast over his life the 
veil of a morbid and over-laden religious consciousness. 
A coward, a dreamer, a weeper of womanish tears from 
pure excess of nervous organization, tormented by 
vague inquietudes and epileptic seizures, unhealthy and 
un-Arabic to the last degree, his ascendency over the 
brave, irreligious, unimaginative, and positive Arabs, is 
a subject of great interest. " Instead of praying five 
times a clay, they never pray," says a traveller, even of 
the Bedouins of to-day. Their land, in Mahomet's time, 
was divided up between the followers of Moses, Christ, 
and polytheism. The Christians had learned from 
Christianity little more than the habit of drinking wine. 
The idolaters admitted one supreme God, Allah, — with 
whom the other divinities were intercessors, — and 
delighted in cheating their idols by sacrificing to them 
a gazelle instead of a sheep. The Jews, intensely intol- 
erant and full of the spirit of persecution, were, perhaps, 
the only sincere and consistent sect of the peninsula. 
Wine, combat, play, and love, held the chief part in the 
life of the Arab, though he was far from being incapable 
of being wrought up, by religious enthusiasm, by a fine 
poem, or the recital of a noble deed, to passionate 
emotion. 

Mahomet's mission was to transform, metamorphose, 
spiritualize a sensual, sceptical, and mocking race. 
Though reviled, treated with every infamy as a diviner, 
magician, fool, he succeeded in cleansing the Arabian 
pantheon of its three hundred and sixty divinities, insti- 
tuting the worship of the true God, founding a great 
Khalifate which shone with serene glory at Damascus 
and Bagdad, while Europe was in night, and convincing 



Arabian Poetry. 103 

countless thousands if not of the truth of Islamism, at 
least of the irresistible might of its armies. 

We see the peculiar administration of Islam firmly 
founded in the ten years' reign of the second Khalif, 
Omar ; and the military system developed by his fol- 
lower Osman, who caused all copies of the Koran, ex- 
cept those in the handwriting of Mahomet's wife, to be 
destroyed. Then we see Moawia, the fifth Khalif, and 
founder of the Omaiyade dynasty, strengthening the 
internal administration, and transforming the elective, 
into an hereditary, Khalifate ; his son Yezid desecrating 
the court of the Khalifs by hordes of singers and wine- 
bibbers ; Abdelmelic, extending Islam from Carthage to 
the Indus, striking the first coins, and assimilating his 
administration more and more to Persian and Byzantine 
models ; Walid, the mightiest and most glorious of the 
Omaiyade Khalifs, building the incomparable mosque 
of Damascus, and ennobling his reign by the noblest 
tributes to architecture, music, and poetry ; and finally, 
the long line of Abbaside Khalifs bringing the glory of 
Moslem science, conquest, and experiment to its culmi- 
nation in the figures of Almansor (753-775), Harun-ar- 
Rachicl (786-808), and Al-Mamoun (813-833). 

Spain became a new forcing-house for Arabian poetry, 
art, and science, especially when it became independent 
of the Eastern Khalifate in 755, under Abderaman I. 
The Khalifs of Cordova illumined the west as those of 
Bagdad did the east. Both Abderaman and his son 
Hicham I., were gifted poets. Three hundred orphan 
children were educated by Abderaman II., in the 
mosque of Cordova, and the stories told of his powers 
of improvisation, his passion for music, and for con- 



104 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

structing mosques, fountains, baths, and aqueducts, 
attest a versatile genius. 

The times of Abderaman III., and his son ITacam, 
were, however, the golden age of Arabian culture in 
Spain. Scientific and artistic activity, refinement of 
manners, the essentials of a polite and comprehensive 
education, were then all but universal. The grandees 
imitated the example of their brilliant princes, and east 
and west were ransacked for teachers skilled in all the 
sciences of the day, in which their sons were to be 
trained. "If a fly buzzed over their heads," says an 
Arabian writer of the Khalifs of Bagdad, " they asked 
the advice of the famous scholar Ismael-ben-Casim," 
called to Spain by the alluring offers of Abderaman 
III. ; and all were said to have been enchanted with 
Casim's striking gifts, his compositions, the nobility of 
his mind, and the grace of his deportment. Under his 
guidance, Hacam devoted twenty years to the accumula- 
tion of his inestimable collection. The Omaiyade 
prince was a George III. in genealogies, and had the 
family tree of all the Arabs of the Spanish provinces at 
his fingers' ends. The wealthier scholars of the day 
assembled in winter in rooms perfumed with musk and 
amber, the floors covered with silken and woollen car- 
pets, and sprinkled with rose-water, while groups cf 
grave Mussulmans gathered around a cylinder of glow- 
ing coals in the centre, and discussed with Oriental 
subtlety, passages and verses from the Koran. Multi- 
tudinous meats, fruits, dates, and daintily prepared 
dishes of every sort were handed round, and fortified 
the strength of the company for new intellectual 
combats. 



Poetry and the Arab's Life. 105 

Such were the house and the social habitudes of Said, 
Tifaqui in Toledo, in the reign of Hacam. 

Poetry was the quintessence of the Arab's life ; ven- 
geance, love, ambition, hospitality, all found their echo 
and idealization in that. The desert, the storm, the 
skirmish, the camel, gazelle, and barb ; the praise of 
the sword and lance; the charms of the beloved, are 
mirrored in it in a series of minute but exquisite pictures 
artificially interwoven in verse of a singularly compli- 
cated structure. The gatherings at the sanctuary of 
Mecca, stimulated the rival poets ; the " divine prose " 
of Mahomet, through the widely disseminated Koran, 
found numerous imitators, and the poetry of the Arabi- 
ans began more and more to sing the praise of the 
prophet and his followers. The gorgeous court of 
Bagdad, with its Persian dances, pantomimes, and 
sports, its musical instruments and songs, its voluptuous 
life, and manifold intellectual energy, influenced these 
poets; they became techniqtie-drvfQxs, learned metrical 
grammarians ; astronomers and jurisconsults. With 
physical slavery, the bondage of the soul went hand in 
hand. The poetry of nature congealed into a court 
poetry, then into a poetry of the schools. 

The Moslem West was the " nerve " of these " else 
unfelt oppressions," and vibrated faithfully to the tunes 
struck in the East. The Spanish Arabs produced some 
of the most beautiful specimens of the poetic art, 
though the two most distinguished poets of the court 
were Spaniards. Abderaman's harem contained, also, 
three or four celebrated poetesses. 

We find the Spanish Arabians delighting in poetic 
encyclopaedias, "knots of jewels," "garlands of song," 



106 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

many-volumed works named after flowers and precious 
stones. The Bedouins were supreme purists ; they were 
connoisseurs in matters of accent, purity of diction, and 
faultless rhythm • and their descendants in Spain culti- 
vated the same virtues. 

History was neglected among the Arabs, both Span- 
ish and Oriental. Genealogists, compilers of anecdotes 
anthologists, gleaners of celebrated events here and 
there, chroniclers of famines, pestilences, and droughts, 
men who enumerated the hours of a prince's life or 
reign while passing over the most important transac- 
tions in silence, abounded in Spain, and continued writ- 
ing those moonlight rhapsodies characteristic of the 
desert, when, assembling his people about him, the 
Arab Sheik fascinated their simple minds by telling 
them the traditions and memories of the race, in a tone 
of mystic and rhythmic enthusiasm. 

Al-Makkari in Spain, Abul-Feda, Makrizi, Ibn-Katib, 
and Siyooti, in Syria and Africa, made voluminous com- 
pilations and chronicles, all of which were destitute of 
critical spirit. 

The Arab book-cases always swarmed with theologi- 
cal works, glossaries, commentaries, and legal treatises. 
The reign of Al-Mamoun (813-833), showed a rapid 
evolution of the science of astronomy out of the fancies 
of astrology ; the precession of the equinoxes, the 
diameter of the earth, the obliquity of the ecliptic, were 
approximately determined in his reign, and the unsur- 
passed serenity of the Spanish and Arabian skies con- 
duced peculiarly to observations of the stars. The first 
astronomical observatory on record, rose 1:1 1196 at 
Seville, erected by Geber; but the conceptions of Arab 






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Scientific Progress. 109 

astronomers were hampered by their adhesion to the 
system of Ptolemy. 

Translations of the Greek geometers, of Euclid, 
Archimedes and Apollonius, for a time satisfied their 
craving for mathematics, but by the tenth century, they 
had begun to solve quadratic and cubic equations, and 
to investigate profoundly the laws of spherical trigo- 
nometry. Their skill in hydraulics is attested by the 
marvellous system of irrigation which they introduced 
into Spain, and which survives there to-day ; and even 
optics and hydrostatics were studied by them. They 
were famous physicians, and, later on, became deeply 
versed in the writings of Galen and Hippocrates. Medi- 
cal treatises like those of Avicenna, Er-Razi, and Ali- 
ibn-Abbas, attained great celebrity, and but for a super- 
stitious horror of dissection, surgery, as shown by their 
improvements in the lancet and the couching-needle, 
would have been successfully cultivated at their hands. 
Their knowledge of chemistry, obvious in the many 
terms which the Europeans have borrowed from them, 
— alkali, alcohol, alembic, and the like. — and in the 
apothecary's symbols, extended to many preparations of 
mercury, arsenic, metallic sulphates, and healing herbs. 
Their skill in metallurgy, in enamelling, in delicate 
manipulation of gold, silver, copper, and porcelain, is 
seen in the well-known Damascus blades, the wonderful 
vase of the Alhambra, and the jewelled dagger-hilts of 
the Khalifs. Writing paper is said to have been known 
at Mecca early in the eighth century ■ the invention of 
gun-powder, which afterwards played so effective a part 
in Ferdinand and Isabella's campaigns against the 
Moors, is attributed by some to them. The pendulum 



110 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

and a species of telegraph were claimed to have been 
introduced by the Arabs into Europe, wirh the silk co- 
coon, the sugar-cane, the date-palm, and the cotton-plant ; 
and to them the invention of the mariner's compass is 
attributed. Cordova became so celebrated for its prep- 
arations of leather, tanned by means of the bitter rind 
of the pomegranate, that it gave its name (Cord wain,) 
to the industry : and the name of Morocco no less is 
commemorated Id the book-lover, in the binding of his 
books. 

Their knowledge of music, save such crude instru- 
mentation as they could draw out of their primitive 
tabor, harp, guitar, and flute, they derived from Persia, 
more especially after the foundation of Bagdad. Even 
the names of the majority of their musical instruments 
are Persian. A generous rivalry soon produced accom- 
plished musicians and singers. Ziryab built up a school 
of thorough musical artists at Cordova, whose renown 
equalled that of the Syrian masters. Music was scien- 
tifically treated, too ; the principles of the art, the 
modes of composition, and musical notation, with the 
notes indicated by letters, were investigated and dis- 
cussed, and startling effects were produced on the sus- 
ceptible Arabs by the songs and melodies of their 
maestri. 

The development of their worship out of Sabaeanism 
and star-worship, their original disinclination, under 
Omar, to literature, then the sudden dawning of the 
Arabian golden age at Bagdad, from the reign of Al- 
mansor (755), through that of his grandson, Harun-ar- 
Rachid, and great-grandson, Almamoun (the former of 
whom never travelled, said Elmacin, without a hundred 
scholars in his suite, and attached a school for poor 



Arabian Philosophy. Ill 

children to every mosque) ; all these things showed, to a 
certain extent^a transformation of the flinty immobility 
originally characteristic of the Bedouin, and a capability 
of progress, if not in law and religion, at least in the 
less rigidly circumscribed sphere of intellectual effort. 

The Nestorian Christians profoundly influenced the 
beginnings of Arabian civilization. The Jews of the 
Orient were celebrated for their academies and labors, 
initiating the Arabs into the profane sciences of an- 
tiquity. The director of the schools of the empire, 
under the cruel but enlightened Harun-ar-Rachid was a 
Christian, deeply versed in Greek literature. " It is 
well known," said Almamoun, the Moslem Augustus, to 
his father, " that the most learned men are found only 
among the Jews and Christians." Caravans returned 
to Bagdad laden with precious manuscripts gathered by 
his command, and translation was pursued with such 
ardor that it became hereditary in certain families, even 
women busying themselves with it. Once translated, 
the originals were destroyed, to be replaced by new 
ones exacted of the Greeks by Almamoun as a sort of 
tribute. Six thousand pupils studied in the university 
of Bagdad. The eminently assimilative spirit of the 
Arabs borrowed alchemy from Egypt, geometry and 
astronomy from Greece, medicine and algebra from 
India, and philosophy and natural science, from the 
writings of Aristotle. 

Meagre as the Arabian chronicles of Spain are, they 
are superior to the contemporary Christian chronicles, 
and fancifully-named as their "Golden Meadows" and 
" Full Moons " of history may be, cut up into an infinity 
of biographic details, they yet throw great light on an 
otherwise hopelessly obscure epoch. 



112 Spain under the Omalyades. 

In their poetry, "Night dialogues with Dawn," "Cy- 
press with Zephyr," the " Nightingale with the Rose," 
there is boundless allegory; — an exquisite physical 
organization renders their poets easily intoxicated with 
harmonious sounds. " I thought of thee," cried one of 
their warrior-poets to his mistress, " while the lances 
were quenching their thirst in my sides, and the Indian 
swords were bathing in my blood ; passionately I longed 
to kiss the swords whose sparkling flash recalled to me 
thy teeth when thou smilest." 

The Arabian philosophers were truly " vassals of 
Aristotle ; " they could disport themselves within his 
inflexible syllogisms when they could not apprehend 
the light and spiritual intelligence of Plato. A mania 
for argumentation, therefore, sprang up among them, 
often degenerating into a mere click-clack of meaning- 
less words. The naked Koran was too plain ; it must 
be encircled with a halo of fantastic allegories ; its 
words, under the influence of the frivolous cabalistic 
studies of the Jewish philosophers reacting upon the 
Arabian, were commented upon with curious care ; magic 
influences were extorted from the innumerable names of 
God and the angels contained in the sacred volume, and 
Arabian magic grew out of religion as astrology out of 
astronomy. 

Averroes of Cordova (1198), Alfarabi (950), who was 
said to know seventy languages, Avicenna, and Alkhindi, 
were the most famous commentators on Aristotle. The 
search for the philosopher's stone and the transmutation 
of metals grew out of these studies. The Arabs really 
revolutionized medicine by substituting emollient reme- 
dies for the drastic purges of the Greeks; they knew 



Arabian Music. 113 

the applications of the moxa and treated small-pox 
intelligently ; and their botanists and geographers made 
immense collections of plants and observations. The 
purity and price of drugs were carefully looked into ; 
naphtha, camphor, syrup, jalap, etc., are claimed to sug- 
gest the intimacy of modern medicine with the works of 
the Arabian pharmaceutists. The Arabic numerals 
substituted for the clumsy Roman ciphers, were said to 
have been brought from Cordova by pope Sylvester II. 
while studying at the university. 

The circumference of the earth was fixed under 
Almamoun at about twenty-four thousand miles, and 
eclipses were studied with care. Frequent severe exam- 
inations held in public, took place at the Spanish uni- 
versities. " The doctor's ink is as good as the martyr's 
blood," is a popular Arabian proverb showing the im- 
portance, later on, attached to learning. 

To the brutal supremacy of a purely militant religion 
we thus see succeeding the calmer arts of peace and 
enlightenment. Cairo, Cairwan and Fez disputed with 
Cordova and Bagdad in the noble rivalry of letters, and 
the shores of the southern Mediterranean became an 
illuminated horizon to the dwellers in darkness and the 
shadow of death on the northern. 

As " an appendix to this picture of civilization," 
came architecture and the kindred arts. Calligraphy, 
with its colored inks and brilliantly tinted parch- 
ments which reflected objects like a mirror, music sug- 
gested by the harmonious language itself, recitative in 
cadenced verse, the lute and mandolin with their 
musical airs written in circles, all showed the mathe- 
matical genius of the Arabs etherealized to a fine art. 



114 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

Music is said to have reconciled Ar-Rachid with his 
favorite odalisque; Alfarabi the Arabian Orpheus, exe 
cuted before the sultan of Syria a piece of music whose 
first chords cast the sultan and his court into a flood of 
laughter, then made them burst into tears, and growing 
faint and fainter, plunged the whole assembly into a 
sweet and ecstatic slumber ! 

The people of Cordova were called to prayer from 
more than four thousand minarets ; long living together 
with Christians came gradually to soften the ferocity of 
manners ; the Christian church-bells rang their congrega- 
tions to divine worship, and priests, nuns, and monks 
were allowed to appear in the streets in the dresses of 
their orders. Cursing Mahomet, and abusing his doc- 
trine were alone forbidden under pain of death. 




THE GIRALDA, SEVILLE. (THE FIRST OBSERVATORY.) 



CHAPTER VI. 

SPAIN UNDER THE OMAIYADES. 
[continued.] 

THE rapid conquests of Islam soon brought the 
Arabs to a knowledge of other lands, and along 
with these conquests went the building of great cities, 
the establishment of fixed abodes, and the cultivation of 
architecture. Immeasurable wealth resulted from these 
expeditions, which was employed largely in rebuilding 
the ruined dwelling-places of the conquered, under the 
superintendence of Greek, Persian, and Syrian engineers 
and architects. The sight of the noble structures of 
their enemies, roused emulation in the Arabs. The 
storm of conquest over, and permanent abodes having 
become necessary for the Khalif and his many govern- 
ors, the simplicity and severity of the earlier followers 
of Mahomet yielded to the luxurious tastes of the later 
conquerors ; splendid mosques and palaces sprung up ; 
Jerusalem, Mecca, and Medina gave evidence of the 
development of Moslem art ; and the sumptuous 
mosque of Damascus — the glory of the Omaiyade 
dynasty — rose as if by enchantment, in the early capi- 
tal of the Eastern Khalifate. The grave of Mahomet 
at Medina, and his sanctuary at Mecca were embel- 
lished. But above all, the Damascus mosque (705-715), 
with its three aisles, its rows of red granite columns, 

117 



118 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

and red and green marble pillars, its dome of the eagle, 
its six hundred lamps of silver swinging by gilded 
chains, its golden-lettered suras, running on a ground of 
azure round the walls within, its triple minarets whence 
the muezzins called to prayer, and its four doors point- 
ing to the four quarters of the world, served to show 
the dawning glory of Mahometan architecture. 

The founding of Bagdad on the Tigris in 762, by Alman- 
sor, — with its six hundred canals, its one hundred and 
five bridges, its ten thousand mosques and baths, itsfour- 
and-twenty thousand municipal divisions, its glorious 
green-domed palace, and the palace built by Almansor 
(through whose seven courts the Greek ambassadors were 
led in the first of which were a hundred lions, in the 
second a hundred giraffes, in the third and fourth, as 
many elephants and Arabian horses), — enormously stim- 
ulated the growth of architecture and all its co-ordinate 
branches. The translations of the mathematical writ- 
ings of the Greeks at the same time gave the Arabs the 
key to many architectural and mechanical principles. 

The founding of the Omaiyade dynasty in the West, 
the favorable conditions by which it was accompanied, 
the beautiful land and climate of Spain, and the great 
caravans perpetually passing to and fro along the Med- 
iterranean countries, bringing rumors of the splendors 
of the Abbaside dynasty of Bagdad ; all this awoke 
keen interest and competition on both sides. Cordova 
became a second Bagdad ; its noble monuments rivalled 
those of the east; its great mosqne competed with 
Almansor's and its sprightly and mobile population 
became adepts in a picturesque and subtle refinement. 

Alxleraman I. is said to have laid the foundation of 



The Cordova Mezquita. 119 

the Cordova "Mezquita," about the year 786. It was 
intended to excel that of Bagdad in elegance, as those 
of Medina and Jerusalem excelled it in repute for holi- 
ness ; and it was to be the memorial of the Omaiyades 
in the peninsula. Abderaman worked an hour on it 
daily with his own hand, and expended more than one 
hundred thousand gold pieces in its construction, but 
he died before its completion. Succeeding sultans set 
aside special taxes and spoils to maintain its associated 
schools and hospitals ; its exquisite chapel is said to 
be due to Hacam, and " the glory of the Evening 
Land " was completed by the terrible Almansor. 

The interior of the mosque is divided into forty- 
eight aisles, nineteen running from north to south, and 
twenty-nine from east to west. Nineteen great doors, 
now walled up, with one exception, opened from the 
lovely fountained court-yard in the direction of Mecca ; 
from a thousand to fourteen hundred columns of precious 
marble, porphyry, jasper, and verd antique, supported 
the horseshoe arches within ; plates of bronze, richly 
wrought, covered the doors ; mouldings in gold, orna- 
mented the main entrance; three gilded globes, sur- 
mounted by a golden pomegranate, rose above the sum- 
mit of the cupola ; four thousand seven hundred lamps 
illumined the glowing darkness of the great sanctuary, 
and one hundred and twenty pounds of aloe and amber 
daily perfumed its spaces. Glass mosaic of curious 
delicacy and beauty, was used with effect in the emblaz- 
oning of the walls and arches, and perhaps the most 
exquisite thing of its kind in the world, is still the 
seven-sided chapel of Hacam, with its blinding marbles 
and its incomparable alhamis and mosaic. 



120 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

The palace of Zahra, built at enormous expense, five 
miles below Cordova, during the reign of Abderaman 
III., had no such lucky fate as the mosque. It was said 
to be rather a city than a palace if we can credit the 
statement that it was two thousand seven hundred ells 
in length and one thousand five hundred in width, 
while Africa, Greece, Spain, and France contributed to 
the thousands of marble columns, of every color, em- 
ployed in its construction. The floors were laid with 
variegated stone, the walls clothed with marble, the 
hues of the rainbow played about the skilfully-wrought 
flagstones, the ceilings sparkled with gold and azure 
inlaid work, and the rafters were of larch-wood, 
delicately chiselled. Marble urns and shells filled with 
crystal water, cooled the larger apartments ; a magnifi- 
cent fountain of jasper from Constantinople, adorned 
the centre of the Khalifs hall, over which hung the 
matchless pearl presented by the Greek emperor to 
Abderaman. The mint and the mosque attached to the 
palace were celebrated. Immense gardens and orchards 
surrounded the palace, with groves of myrtle and laurel, 
and there were lakes overhung by pleasure-houses. The 
Khalifs pavilion of white marble, upheld by columns 
with gilded capitals, rose on an elevation of the garden, 
and in the centre was a porphyry fountain-shell, filled 
with quicksilver, of blinding brightness when mcon or 
sun shone upon it, so that, " if he wished to surprise or 
terrify any one in his company, the Khalif would make a 
sign to one of his Slavonians to put the quicksilver in 
motion ; the glare from which would strike the eye of 
the spectator like flashes of lightning, and alarm all 
present with the idea that the room was in motion, as 
long as the agitation of the quicksilver continued." 



The Palace of Zahra. 121 

Marble baths of great solidity and elegance were 
found in the gardens, in which curtains, covers, and 
carpets of gold and silver stuff, artistically wrought 
with foliage, flowers, and animals, ministered to the 
pleasure and seclusion of the bathers. Travellers from 
the far East came to visit Zahra and declared that it 
was unique in its kind. The accounts left by the 
Arabian historians of the mosque of Cordova, which is 
so perfect to-day, are so accurate, that it would not be 
stretching credulity to an extreme to put faith in their 
descriptions of Zahra, the " Flower and Blossom " of 
palaces, which has utterly vanished from the face of 
the earth. 

The shadows of palms and pomegranates overhung 
innumerable fountains erected by Abderaman II. and 
III. ; a great aqueduct brought water to Cordova, and 
discharged it in a mighty reservoir guarded by colossal 
lions covered with pure gold and with jewels for eyes — 
" among the most astonishing performances of kings of 
any age." Love of water, of overshadowing verdure, 
of secrecy, of a reserved and intimate life, characterizes 
the Mussulman wherever he may be. 

The domestic architecture was simple and graceful ; 
enclosed and colonnaded courts, with a fountain in the 
middle ; gayly-colored tiles, shadow-filled rooms, mosaic 
ornamentation, trellises of daintily-wrought iron, flow- 
ers, murmuring water. The exterior — for fear of the 
evil eye — was plain and unostentatious ; echoes were 
avoided by careful construction ; light percolated from 
above through lattices often filled with colored glass ; 
and the houses in winter were heated by iron or burnt- 
clay pipes. 



122 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

The Arabian style of architecture underwent a grad- 
ual development out of what might be called Arabo-By- 
zantine, through the Arabo-Moorish, to the quaint and 
fanciful Moorish proper. The simplicity of the Greek 
and Byzantine styles was too austere for the luxury- 
loving Arab : he added new forms and new wealth of 
adornment, with obvious reminiscences of Palmyra and 
Heliopolis ; in fact his religion compelled him to make 
essential changes. 

The round arch in his hands became horseshoe- 
shaped, now semi-circular, now pointed, symbolizing, 
according to Hartwell, the inverted crescent of Islam ; 
short, slender columns, placed singly or grouped on a 
common base, were introduced ; arches resting on the 
capitals of the columns, and forming a projection over 
the impost, built over by a second series of narrower 
arches ; flat doors almost unornamented, semi-circular 
or horseshoe-shaped windows of small size, walls em- 
bellished with mosaic and stucco, low roofs, especially to 
the dome-covered mosques, and slender minarets ; such 
are some of the main features of the system. 

The need of elaborate embellishment in the interior 
of their palaces and mosques soon showed itself; 
hence the evolution of that eccentric compound of 
mathematically formed foliage, flowers, geometric fig- 
ures, hexagons and octagons, flower-stalks and brilliant 
colors intertwined and meandering to infinity, called 
Arabesques, so that the palace walls came to look like a 
"Cashmere shawl illuminated." 

In the first period, Byzantine influence was dominant 
from the eighth to the tenth centuries ; in the second, 
this influence vanishes imperceptibly: rich and peculiar 



Art and Architecture. 123 

ornamentation invades the unimpassioned and symmet- 
rical architecture of Greece and Rome with a torrent 
of imagery ; and in the third, buildings seemed con- 
structed solely for the arabesques. 

Arabian baths in Gerona, Barcelona, and other places, 
and the mosque of Cordova, are the most perfect types 
of the first period, when the Moslems constructed their 
public buildings largely at the expense of antiquity, 
utilized their materials awkwardly, and aimed at sen- 
sational effects, produced by the sudden presentation of 
a multiplicity of columns — as in the mosque of Cor- 
dova — to the observer as he entered. 

The mihrab, or chapel of this mosque, crowned by 
its perfect dome, and decorated with an ethereal ele- 
gance elsewhere unrivalled, is the best type of the 
second period, in its transition from the mosque of 
Cordova to the Moorish Alhambra. The horse-shoe 
arch vanishes more and more into the ogive ; the 
Byzantine ornaments give way to costly decorations 
of more recherche form. Glass mosaic, or mosaic of 
colored paste, and sculptured marble, are withdrawn from 
the walls and half-orange domes ; new combinations of 
regular figures made of enamelled faience take their place ; 
Arabic inscriptions in marble or mosaic meander around 
the domes. Such are features of the Giralda tower, 
and the ancient mosque at Seville, the Alcazar at Se- 
ville in its older parts, the mihrab of Cordova, and the 
architecture of Tunis and Morocco. 

The contact of the Spanish and African Moslems, 
under Abderaman III., and during the following cen- 
turies, after the dissolution of the Khalifate ; the arrival 
of the fierce Morabites, under Yusouf, and their con- 



124 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

flict with Alfonso VI., converted Arabian and Syrian 
Spain into a Moorish or African kingdom. The taste 
in art and architecture seems to have gone hand in 
hand with the political vicissitudes of the times. 

The hills of Granada became the centre of a fan- 
tastic, but wonderfully original development in archi- 
tecture, after the glory of Cordova had passed away. 
Extravagant pomp of adornment, vaulted roofs glistening 
with stalactitic pendents, walls cased in a dazzling armor 
of many-colored faience, arched galleries hung between 
pillars like stucco draperies and blossom-garlands, courts 
filled with slender-throated pillars that arrange them- 
selves in multifold combinations before the eyes of the 
beholder, geometric ceilings, star-shaped, blazing with 
representations of the heavens in gold and tint, domes 
and cupolas uplifted on airy pillars, too slight for their 
burdens ; in short, an architecture whose object seems 
to be to realize a hasheesh dream, and build over great 
spaces of golden sunlight, wherein voluptuaries, en- 
shrined as it were in the irradiation, might dream away 
a life-time of fantastic reverie, and have but to look 
above to see their visions incarnated. 

The Arab architecture literally blossomed itself to 
death, and the Vermilion towers of the Alhambra, with 
their walls eighteen feet thick, were its burial place. — 

The basis of the Mussulman legislation is the Koran, 
and it is due to the immutability of this volume that 
this legislation has not changed in 1200 years. What 
strikes an observer in the system, is the omnipotence 
of a code that embraces everything, from health to the 
houris of Paradise; its absolutism, and the predomi- 
nance of the religious principle in it. Proselytism was 




PATIO DE LOS LEONES (COURT OF LIONS), ALHAMBRA. 



The Laivs of the Koran. 12 T 

the essence of the endless migrations and conquests 
of the Arabs, and though other religions were tolerated 
under the shadow of Islam, it did not borrow even the 
slightest ceremonial from any of them after it had once 
hardened into the inflexible organization left by Ma- 
homet. High-priests, sovereigns, legislators, judges, and 
generals, in one, his followers during the Khalifate, con- 
centrated powers of every sort in a single hand, and 
that hand wielded the sceptre of God's vicegerent. A 
perpetual confusion hence arose between their religion 
and their law, the changelessness of the one affected 
the other, and, while the people themselves developed, 
not a syllable of the Koran changed from the foundation 
of the earliest Khalifate. The text of the Koran itself, 
and the sunnas, or traditions, are the two-fold pillars 
upon which the Mussulman law rests. The sunnas 
supplement the Koran, consist of precepts gathered by 
tradition from the mouth of the prophet, and have 
been overlaid by the countless commentaries of the 
four great orthodox Mussulman doctors, Haneefah, 
Melee, Shafei', and Hannbal. It is said of Haneefah, 
that while in prison he read the Koran seven thousand 
times ! Turkey, Tartary, and Hindostan, are the present 
seats of his doctrine more especially ; Melee's doctrine 
ruled in Spain; Shafei's in Arabia and Egypt; and 
Hannbal's in certain corners of Arabia. 

The Mahometan heretics are more numerous than 
the true believers ; the four orthodoxies are combated 
by as many heterodoxies : those who deny the eternity 
of God's attributes as incompatible with the unity of 
God, predestination, eternal punishment, and the Koran ; 
the stubborn defenders of these doctrines as essential 



128 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

to the divine essence ; the rebels, or those who sepa- 
rated themselves from Ali after the battle of Schiffen, 
and slew the prophet's son-in-law ; and, lastly, the fa- 
natical partisans of Ali, whom they revere almost equally 
with his father-in-law. These latter (Shiites) and the 
Sunnites, as represented by the Persians and the Turks, 
hate each other far more than they hate the infidels. 

Adoration and good works are the fundamental divis- 
ions of the law ; but their sub-divisions are almost infi- 
nite and it will be impossible to follow them out in 
detail. The system tolerated polygamy (to the extent 
of four wives for a free man) and concubinage, already 
sanctioned in the countries whence Islamism sprang ; ;t 
allotted an inferior position to women, permitted divorce, 
assigned extensive power to the father (though a son 
was not a thing, as in the Roman law, and his life was 
not in his father's hands), and recognized slavery, though 
far more mercifully and humanely, than the Roman or 
the Christian Goth. Emancipation was a meritorious 
act; slavery was not inflicted as a legal chastisement; 
and liberty was gained by conversion to Islam : a great 
blessing to the majority of Moslem slaves, who were 
Christians. Islam therefore was undeniably more pa- 
tient and gentle than either antiquity or many modern 
nations, in its attitude toward these unfortunates. Usury 
was condemned. Property in the modern sense existed 
originally neither for the Moslem nor for his tributary, 
since all was the Khalifs, and the Khalif was God's 
lieutenant. But, little by little, the feoffs pledged by 
the Arab chiefs at the conquest of Spain, became heredi- 
tary, and property "belonging to God and the State," 
was freely transmitted The sovereign disposed in the 



Moslem Government. 129 

name of Allah of the fortunes and lives of his subjects, 
and thus instability and uncertainty, resulting from 
vague generalizations, kept the whole of Moslem society 
in continual uneasiness. 

The law tolerated retaliation, blood-vengeance, and 
commutation by fine ; eternal vengeance pursued mur- 
derers ; suicide was made infamous; theft was 'pun- 
ished by mutilation, though by degrees this horrible 
retaliation was converted into imprisonment or the 
bastinado. " The rod," says the Koran, "is an instru- 
ment descended from heaven." Adulterers were stoned 
to death, though this happens but rarely now ; infanti- 
cide, recognized in the codes of Sparta, the laws of 
Solon, at Rome, and under the empire, was an abomina- 
tion to Mahomet, who insisted on the sacredness of 
human life. Eighty lashes reminded the wine-bibber of 
his guilt, if his breath betrayed him. 

The organization of the Moslem judiciary was in out- 
line as follows : The dignity cadi or judge was of spe- 
cial sacredness in the eyes of Mahomet. The cadi must 
be distinguished by purity, impartiality, rectitude, and 
knowledge of the law and theology. He was without 
regular salary ; his decisions were irrevocable and with- 
out appeal ; simony or bribery in him were punishable 
with removal ; receiving of presents, communication 
with the parties, influencing of witnesses, and decision 
in favor of his own relations, were forbidden. 

A supreme tribunal, called the cadi of cadis, consti- 
tuted a court of highest instance which in doubtful cases 
judged the process, the sentence and the judge. Appeal 
was in certain cases allowed to the sovereign. The tes- 
timony of slaves or infidels against Mussulmans was 



130 Spain under the Omaiyades* 

not valid. The cadi was assisted by a sort of consul- 
tative jury who were present at? trials and rave their 
advice when asked. The numerous descendant) of the 
prophet — a " nation within a nation" — enjoyed cer- 
tain privileges supervised by a nakib, or protector. 

Such are some of the cardinal points of the Mussul- 
man law as laid down in the commentators, who hava 
developed a complicated organism out of the germs con- 
tained in the Koran. Reminiscences of it survive in 
Christian Spain even to-day, and the language is full of 
words derived from the Arabic designations. 

The regular revenues of the state under the Omai- 
yades, seem to have been equal to about forty million 
dollars, from which are excluded extraordinary levies in 
case of war or for public buildings. 

The wealth and prosperity of the country under this 
dynasty have been called fabulous. The population in- 
creased daily. The kingdom was full of manufactories 
for silk, cotton, and cloth; the cultivation of indigo and 
the cochineal, the production of beautiful faic7ice, the 
introduction of paper into Spain in the twelfth century, 
the substitution of linen for cotton in the dress of the 
fastidious Arabs, the working of the mines of gold, 
silver, and mercury, the sifting of the auriferous sand of 
the Darro in the Vega of Granada, the discovery of 
precious stones at Malaga and Deja, of coral on the 
coast of Andalusia, of pearls at Tarragona, and the 
utilization of the wonderful salt mines of Catalonia, 
which produced the finest salt in Europe, brought the 
country to a high state of prosperity. 

Agriculture had made immense progress ; exotic 
plants were introduced in numbers ; the balmy flowers 



Moslem Agriculture. 181 

of the Orient, as much prized for their beauty of form 
and color as for their perfume, spiced the air. Abde 
raman wrote an exquisite poem on the palm, which he 
introduced, and which came to grow in tens of thou- 
sands near Elche. The Spanish rice and saffron are 
memorials of Arabian care for foreign products. Val- 
encia, the picturesque Vega of Granada, — -thirty leagues 
«of orange and olive gardens, watered by five rivers, — 
and the basin of the Guadalquivir, with its thousands 
of villages, became lovely oases endowed with a match- 
less fertility. 

Under Hacam the most illustrious sheiks gloried in 
cultivating their own gardens ; the cadis and faquis de- 
lighted in the shadow of their own vines. In the spring 
and autumn the country seats were filled with brilliant 
figures — merchants, townspeople, students — leaving 
the towns and cities, to pass a few months in the sylvan 
solitude of the sierras. Vast herds of cattle and sheep 
kept up the recollections of the desert, by their wander- 
ings from province to province in search of pasture as 
the seasons changed. The shepherds thus kept up an 
errant manner of life, which, from unknown antiquity, 
had been peculiar to Irac, Chaldaea, and Egypt, and at 
the same time maintained the reputation of the Spanish 
fleeces as the best in the world. 

Arabian conquest had been rendered easy by means 
of the roads already traced out by the innumerable car- 
avans crossing and re-crossing the peninsula to India, 
Persia, and the Sahara ; and these conquests necessi- 
tated the establishment of fleets, to maintain the Mus- 
sulman power in the southern Mediterranean. 

The establishment of rival dynasties of Abbasides 



132 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

and Omaiyades, in the East and the West, much as their 
khalifs despised each other, could, not crush out the 
strong commercial instincts of the people. Silk, wool, 
oil, sugar, amber, cochineal, iron, and the finely-tempered 
arms of Toledo and Cordova, were exchanged for the 
luxuries, slaves, and spices of Syria and the Indies, 
Great mercantile ports like Barcelona, Valencia, and 
Almeria, became the mediums of communication with 
Europe and Africa, uninterrupted even after the fall of 
the khalifate. A thousand merchant vessels, it is said, 
sprinkled the sea with the countless yield of the new 
conquests. 

Beautiful Greek slaves, skilled in music and dancing, 
peopled the harems of the Orient and were a source of 
wealth to the Andalusian merchants. Eunuchs to guard 
the harems — chiefly Europeans and negroes — were 
manufactured in hundreds at Verdun and sent to Cor- 
dova to form part of the Khalifs guard. 

The prodigious fertility of the country is said to have 
supported a population at this time correspondingly 
great. Under Augustus the population of Spain was 
claimed to be seventy millions, and Spain itself was 
called "the country of the thousand cities." The cities 
were numerous, especially along the eastern and southern 
coasts, nearest to Carthage and Rome. Moslem super- 
stition objected to a census ; hence we cannot determine 
more than approximately what the population was at 
the height of the Omaiyade dynasty. The Almoravide 
Yusouf boasted that the chotbah was recited for him 
from nineteen thousand pulpits. The frequent famines 
go to prove indirectly the populousness of the land. 
The vassal population was very large; Christians 



Moslem Chivalry and Religion. 133 

abounded at Toledo, Cordova, Merida, and Barcelona, 
and Jews in great numbers were settled in Spain, and 
are found interested in all the seditions against the 
the Khalifate. 

Perpetual war against the Christians — the "holy 
war" — was considered eminently praiseworthy in the 
sight of Allah. The usual tolerance of the Mussulmans 
here snapped violently asunder, and religious hate, ac- 
companied by frightful devastations, led to sanguinary 
encounters through seven centuries. Both slaves and 
Christians, however, were numerous in the Mussulman 
armies. The Khalif's body guard, twelve thousand 
strong, for the most part foreigners, were the only pro- 
fessional soldiers ; a corps blazing with costly arms and 
gold, instituted for the personal defence of the sovereign 
alone and devoted to his interests. 

The institutions of chivalry were peculiar to Christian 
Europe, and hardly appeared among the Mussulmans 
till the downfall of the Omaiyades ; jousts, tourneys, 
tilts of reeds, were favorite sports of the Arabs; broad- 
sword, lance, bow, and mace, were the arms of the 
Andalusians. Groups of turbaned warriors, seated on 
high, richly-mounted saddles, with distinguishing colors 
for each tribe, and clad in fluttering mantles, dashed 
gallantly on the heavy Christian cavalry and often put 
it to rout. The Arabian horsemanship was famous. 
In 1 02 2, a sort of national guard, composed of burgher 
militia, was formed for the protection of the cities, 
streets, and quarters. 

Islam, " perfect resignation of soul and body to the 
will of God," is the quintessence of Mahometan fatal- 
ism, and its atmosphere pervades the whole system, from 



134 Spain under the Omaiyades. 

one end of it to the other. The Mahometans form a 
vast family despotically ruled by God's deputy, the 
Khalif ; in him religious and political chiefship alike are 
centred, and a pure and absolute despotism is the re- 
sult. Blind submission belongs to the sovereign, and 
his power cannot be divided with another sovereign. 
"The prophet's scabbard," said Mahomet, "might as 
well have contained two swords, as his empire two 
kings." 

The prime minister, or hctdjib, was the most direct dep- 
uty of the Khalif, and that his power could become 
great and terrible we see in the case of Almansor, had- 
jib of Hicham II. He was the first subject of the 
kingdom and owed his elevation entirely to the caprice 
of the sovereign. 

The principal dignitaries after the hadjib were the 
lieutenants of the provinces, who held in their hands 
all civil and military functions. Emi?' or Amil, was the 
name given to them; they had under them twelve gov- 
ernors of the twelve principal cities, and twenty-four 
viziers (burden-bearers). Then came the chiefship of 
the Khalif s guard, ordinarily entrusted to some mem- 
ber of his family ; the commanders of the cavalry and 
infantry ; the alcaides, or governors of fortresses, and 
the sheiks, or tribal chieftains, who still maintained the 
patriarchal empire and classifications of the desert. 

The chief civil magistrates, in a system in which the 
functions of citizen and soldier were but confusedly 
perceived and discriminated, were the cadi or judge, the 
mufti ox counsellor, the ulemas (scientific body), and the 
faquis or jurisconsults (both of which last classes were 
charged with the religious and judicial instruction of 



The Khalifs Power. 137 

youth); and the market inspectors, tax-gatherers, and 
tax-distributors. 

The divan or council of state of the Khalifs, was a 
purely consultative body ; but under the Andalusian 
Omaiyades it took cognizance of the army, of imposts, 
and of the administration of the finances. 

A civil and religious police growing out of the con- 
tinual confusion between law and religion existed side 
by side ; the first a body who watched over the public 
security, weights and measures, the professions, com- 
merce, roads, and markets ; the other, more or less 
inquisitorial, and devoted to the domain of conscience. 

All power is thus seen to emanate directly from the 
Khalif, through a complicated hierarchy of delegated 
servants ; all rights descend from, none ascend to, the 
Khalif, who is the apex of the pyramid. There is no 
regular clergy, for the head of the state is equally the 
head of the faith and its supreme interpreter, and 
those beneath him bold merely spiritual lieutenancies. 
All functions are temporary, revocable at his will ; there 
is no notion of representation on the side of the people, 
though the Khalif is minutely and omnipresently rep- 
resented. 



Chronological Table from the Berber Conquest to the Fall 
of the Omaiyades. 

Kingdom of Cordova. 
711-755. Spain governed by Emirs dependent on 

Damascus. 
755-788. Abderaman I. 
788-796. Hicham I. 



138 Chronological Table. 



796-822. 


Hacam I. 


822-852. 


Abderaman II. 


852-886. 


Mohammed I. 


886-888. 


Mondhir. 


888-912. 


Abdallah. 



Khalifate of Cordova. 

912-961. Abderaman III. 

961-976. Hacam II. 

976-1009 (?) Hicham II. (Almansor — Modjaffar — 

Abderaman hddjibs.) 
1009-1010. Mohammed II. Mahdi. 
ioio(?)-ioi6. Solaiman. 

1016-1018. Ali-ibn-Hammoud, I Alcasim- ( Edriside 
ioi8(?)-io23. Abderaman IV., \ Yahia, ( dynasty. 
1 023-1 023. Abderaman V. 
1024-1025. Mohammed III. 
1025-1026. Yahia (second time Khalif). 
1027-1031. Hicham III. (Last of the Omaiyades.) 



1 085-1 109. Almoravide Conquest. (Battle of Zallaca.) 
1 1 06. Death of the Almoravide Emir Yousof. 



1130-1163. Almohade Conquest. 

1 162. Death of Abdelmoumen. 

1163-1184. Almohade lEmir Yousof.f. (Battle of 

Marcos.) 

1 195. Emir Yacoub. 

1199-1213. Emir Mohammed. (Battle of Las Navas.) 

12 13-1236. Decline and fall of the Almohade Empire. 

1247-1492. Emirate of Granada as vassal to Castile. 



CHAPTER VII. 

CHRISTIAN SPAIN TO THE ALMORAVIDE CON- 
QUEST. 

THE first hundred years after the Berber conquest 
have a three-fold importance, and were filled 
with events which controlled and moulded the destinies 
of the country, down to the reign of Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella. Such were the founding of a new Christian 
kingdom in the Asturias, the founding of an independent 
Arabian power at Cordova, and the establishment of the 
Frankish March in the north-east of the peninsula. 

The fatal battle of the Guadalete, in 711, which 
legend has illuminated with the glitter of Roderic's 
golden sandals and at which the last of the Goths laid 
down his crown and life, opened the peninsula to the 
Moslem hordes, who penetrated and conquered every 
part of it except the narrow strip of the Asturias. The 
Asturian and Cantabrian mountains had always been a 
barrier insurmountable to conquest. Phenicians and 
Carthaginians had failed in their attempts to subjugate 
the invincible mountaineers of that region ; it cost Rome 
two hundred years to break their spirit ; and the Goths 
succeeded, only after repeated attempts, in establishing 
themselves in those districts. To this inaccessible 
nook the Christians fled, betrayed by their own people 
and scandalously routed by a handful of barbarians. 

*39 



140 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

In this case ex septentrione lux ; for out of this germ 
developed the principalities of Christian Spain which 
spread along the Pyrenees to Barcelona, extended west- 
ward to Galicia and Portugal, and in little more than a 
hundred years covered the whole north of Spain. 

Intimately connected with the beginning of this new 
power is the legend of Pelagius, the Don Pelayo of 
Spanish story, reputed son of the Fafila, Duke of 
Cantabria, who, banished from court by Egica, was slain 
in Galicia by Witica. Pelayo fled to the mountains of 
Cantabria, then returned from banishment, served Rod- 
eric as sword-bearer, survived the disaster of the Gua- 
dalete, and retreated, with a remnant of his followers, to 
Asturias. Here he founds a little kingdom close upon 
the confines of the Moslem jDower ; he hides in caves, 
bursts from time to time victoriously forth on the hosts 
of Alchama, the Moslem governor, fills the river Deva 
with the arms and bodies of the misbelievers, is pro- . 
claimed king by the enthusiastic Asturians, reigns nine- 
teen years, and is buried in Can gas by the side of his 
queen Gaudiosa. 

Such is but one of the countless legends that hang, 
thick as vines, about Pelayo and his doughty deeds. It 
is perhaps hopeless to attempt a reconciliation of the 
contradictions existing between the statements of the 
Arabian and Christian chronicles concerning him. All 
we know is that, for whatever reason, Pelayo's name be- 
came celebrated among his immediate successors as the 
heroic founder of the new Asturian kingdom, and his 
memory glorious as the first national champion of re- 
generated Spain. 

The two yean/ reign of Fafila. his. son. was tragi- 



Alfonso the Catholic. 141 

cally closed in an encounter with a bear. He was suc- 
ceeded by his brother-in-law, Alfonso I., who united 
the whole sea-coast of Cantabria, as far as the Basque 
country, with the realm to which he had been newly 
elected, and triumphantly maintained the reputation of 
the Christian arms. We find him building churches 
awd cloisters, laying out new towns, winning the love of 
his people by his wisdom and valor, acquiring the sur- 
name of " the Catholic " by his piety, reigning eighteen 
years with skill and conscientiousness, and even after 
death in possession of a wonder-working body. 

His reign emerges from the general obscurity of the 
rise of the kingdom of Leon and Asturias as one of sin- 
gular importance. The kingdom under him showed a 
sudden growth, attributed by the Latin chronicles to 
Alfonso himself, who with his speck of a principality, 
miraculously beat the Mussulmans, captured numbers 
of cities, and pushed back the enemy over the Duero, 
Mondego, and Tagus. The Arabian chronicles, with 
greater probability, attribute the sudden growth of Al- 
fonso's power to two very intelligible causes ; a civil 
war among the Mussulmans themselves, and a frightful 
famine. 

The conquerors settled in the provinces adjacent to 
Asturias were not Arabs but Berbers, who were solidly 
established in every town in Galicia, and were the true 
conquerors of the peninsula. The Arabs, however, their 
bitter foes, had appropriated the choicest portion of the 
booty, kept the lovely and opulent fields of Andalusia 
for themselves, and banished Taric and his Berbers to 
the sterile plains of La Mancha, Estremadura, and the 
precipices of Leon, Asturias, and Galicia. The Arabs 



142 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

themselves treated their Berber allies with the greatest 
cruelty ; scourged and tortured them when they had 
ransomed Christians, and cast them into filthy . dun- 
geons swarming with animalcules, there to linger and 
languish. 

Hence the intense irritation of the Berbers of Spain 
against the Arabs, which was envenomed still further 
by a religious and political insurrection that broke out 
in Africa, now ferociously oppressed by the Arabs. The 
insurrection spread to Spain, broke out in Galicia, 
communicated itself to the whole of the north except 
Saragossa, where the Arabs were in the ascendant, and 
ended in the temporary defeat and expulsion of the 
Arabs. Then the Berbers of Galicia, Merida, Coria, 
and Talavera marched against the south, where they 
were beaten • a five-years' famine (750) decimated their 
ranks, and the majority resolved to emigrate from 
Spain. Their embarkation took place from the river 
Barbato ; hence these disastrous years are called by 
them " the years of the Barbato." 

Tyranny, religious persecution, and hunger, therefore, 
were Alfonso's ablest allies in these early struggles. 
The Galicians profited by the emigration to rise against 
the remnant of their oppressors in 751, and recognized 
Alfonso as their king. The traces of the Mussulmans 
vanished from the regions they had so lately inhabited ; 
the apostate Christians returned eagerly within the pale 
of the church, and in 753 the retiring barbarians evacu- 
ated Braga, Porto, and Viseu, leaving the whole coast 
beyond the mouth of the Duero, liberated from their 
yoke. Unable to maintain themselves in Astorga, Leon, 
Zamora, Ledesma, and Salamanca, they retreated on 




INTERIOR OF THE MOSQUE OF CORDOVA. 



Mussulman Dominion narrowed. 145 

Coria and Merida. In the east they abandoned Sal- 
dafia, Simancas, Segovia, Avila, Miranda on the Ebro, 
and Oca ; so that Coimbra in Portugal, Talavera and 
Toledo on the Tagus, and Guadalaxara, Tudela, and 
Pampelona became their principal frontier cities, run- 
ning from west to east. 

This was the manner in which the Mussulman domi- 
nation, after an occupation of forty years, narrowed 
more and more, and concentrated itself in the fertile 
and beautiful regions of the south and east. Alfonso 
did not conquer these numerous and strong cities : 
they were abandoned, and welcomed the Christian 
champion with open arms. He even profited little by 
all these advantages ; put the remaining Mussulmans to 
the sword ; carried off the Christian populations to 
re-people the devastated north ; and occupied, of all the 
abandoned territory, only old Castile (then called 
Baniitlia), the coast of Galicia, and perhaps the city of 
Leon. The rest was left a desert which formed an 
admirable natural barrier between the Christians of the 
north and the infidels of the south. Even large cities 
like Astorga and Tuy waited a century (850) before 
they were repeopled under Ordono I. 

In the neighborhood of Astorga and Leon, neverthe- 
less, the Berbers maintained themselves for nearly a 
century. The country they inhabited, which formed 
part of the Campi Gothici, was baptized by Christian 
horror with the name of Malacoutia (Mala Gothia), 
"servants of the devil and sons of perdition." Their 
Christianization was always suspicious, and after a 
thousand years their stammering Spanish, shaven 
crowns, customs, dress, and accent, show these Marago- 



146 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

tas (malagoutas) muleteers, to the southeast of Astorga, 
to have the narrowest of affinities with their Berber 
brethren in Africa. 

The conquest of Narbonne from the Arabs, by 
Pippin, in 759, made an end to Arabian influence on 
the other side of the Pyrenees, and opened the penin- 
sula to his mighty son, Charlemagne. Charlemagne 
crossed the mountains by way of Aquitania and Na- 
varre, overwhelmed Pampelona, whose walls he levelled 
on his return, received the homage of the Arabian gov- 
ernor of Oca, and when on the point of capturing Sara- 
gossa, was recalled by a new insurrection of the Saxons. 
In the narrow pass of Roncesvalles the Basques, headed 
apparently by Duke Lupus of Aquitania, cut the rear 
guard of the withdrawing army to pieces. Eggihard, 
the presider over the royal table, Anselm the Palgrave, 
and Roland of the Wonder-Horn, Margrave of Brittany, 
fell in this celebrated conflict, immortalized in song and 
legend. The absence of the Franks soon caused 
Abderaman to reoccupy the land between the Ebro and 
the Pyrenees. 

Connected with the same episode, whose success was 
attributed to him, is the musical and romantic legend 
of Bernardo del Carpio, the bastard son of Dona Xime- 
na, sister of Alfonso the Chaste, and Sancho Diaz, Count 
of Saldana ; a legend filled with improbabilities, reck- 
less of dates, and yet replete with the delicate grace of 
the Spanish ballad. 

" The Count Don Sancho Diaz, the Signior of Saldane, 
Lies weeping in his prison, for he cannot refrain. 
King Alfonso and his sister, of both cloth he complain, 
But most of bold Bernardo, the champion of Spain ! " 



Bernardo del Oarpio. 147 

According to the chronicle (pursues the chronicler 
of one of the episodes of his life), Bernardo, being at 
last wearied out of all patience by the cruelty of which 
his father was the victim, determined to quit the court 
of his king and seek an alliance among the Moors. 
Having fortified himself in the castle of Carpio, he 
made continual incursions into the territory of Leon, 
pillaging and plundering wherever he came. The king 
at length besieged him in his stronghold, but the de- 
fence was so gallant that there appeared no prospect of 
success ; whereupon many of the gentlemen of Alfon- 
so's camp entreated the king to offer Bernardo imme- 
diate possession of his father's person, if he would 
surrender his castle. Bernardo at once consented, but 
the king gave orders to have Count Sancho Diaz taken 
off instantly in his prison, When he was dead, they 
clothed him in splendid attire, mounted him on horse- 
back, and so led him towards Salamanca, where his son 
was expecting his arrival. As they drew nigh the city 
the king and Bernardo rode out to meet them ; and 
when Bernardo saw his father approaching, he ex- 
claimed, " O God ! is the Count of Saldana indeed 
coming ? " " Look where he is," replied the cruel 
king, " and now go and greet him whom you so long 
desired to see." Bernardo went forward, took his 
father's hand to kiss it ; but when he felt the dead 
weight of the hand, and saw the livid face of the corpse, 
he cried aloud, and said, " Ah, Don San Diaz, in an 
evil hour didst thou beget me ! Thou art dead and I 
have given my stronghold for thee, and now I have 
lost all ! " 

Froila I. ascended the throne on the death of his 



148 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

father Alfonso I. He is said to have founded Oviedo 
and to have been a successful and valiant captain 
against the Arabs, fifty-four thousand (?) of whom suc- 
cumbed to him at Pontumium in Galicia. The murder 
of his own brother Vimaran, brought about his assassi- 
nation at the hands of the grandees, in 768. They 
chose in his stead Aurelio, son of Froila, Alfonso I.'s 
brother, who reigned six years, and left few traces be- 
hind. Silo, husband of Adosinda, daughter of Alfonso 
I., followed with a peaceful reign of nine years, and 
died without issue in 783. Alfonso II., son of Alfonso 
the Catholic, was now proclaimed king, though for six 
years pushed aside by his half-brother, Maurecat, an 
illegitimate son of Alfonso the Catholic, who died in 
789. Alfonso was then proclaimed king for the second 
time, the first time having been at the instigation of his 
aunt, Adosinda, who, instead of taking the veil as the 
widow of Silo, according to an ancient custom sanctioned 
by a council, hoped, by establishing her young nephew 
on the throne, to rule herself. After a two years' reign 
he was dethroned by the church-deacon Bermudo I., 
one of his relations, and incarcerated in a cloister. The 
monk was everywhere defeated by the victorious troops 
of Hicham I. Alfonso was drawn out of his retreat, 
and Bermudo suddenly remembered that he could not 
be king as he had taken orders. The Mussulmans pil- 
laged and destroyed Alfonso's capital (794), — probably 
Oviedo, though Silo and Maurecat had resided else- 
where, — undertook another successful raid in 795 under 
Abd-al-carim, — who destroyed the capital again and in- 
flicted enormous losses on the " polytheists " (Chris- 
tians), — and were brilliantly repaid by Alfonso's capture 



St, James of Compostella. 149 

and pillaging of Lisbon in 796, and the dread which he 
inspired by his alliance with the formidable Charle- 
magne. Charlemagne's death in 814 left the imperial 
throne vacant. It was filled by his son Louis, who 
caused his second son, Pippin, to be crowned king of 
Aquitania, which included Aquitania proper, Vasconia, 
Toulouse, Carcasone in Septimania, and Autun, Ava- 
lon, and Nevers in Burgundy. The Spanish Ma>r/:, 
founded in the northeast of the peninsula by the 
Franks, was separated from this nwe kingdom and 
erected into an independent duchy whose capital was 
Barcelona. The count of Barcelona under the Frank- 
ish administration became also duke of Septimania, and 
recognized only the emperor and his eldest son as his 
lords. 

Alfonso II., called the Chaste, after a reign of half a 
century, during which he distinguished himself by his 
piety and vigor, died in the repute of having been the 
founder of the great Spanish sanctuary of Santiago, at 
Compostella, in 829. In his day was discovered the 
burial place of the Apostle James (Iago), whose body, 
after his martyrdom in Palestine, was believed to have 
been brought by his devoted followers to Spain and 
buried on the coast of Galicia. Wondrous radiance and 
visions of angels over the consecrated spot revealed the 
tomb to the Bishop Theodomir, who hastened to the 
king with the joyful intelligence ; and the exemplary 
monarch forthwith built a church for the reception of 
the relics, richly endowed it with lands, and removed 
the episcopal see of Iria to the new foundation. 

The building up of church and state thus went on 
slowly and laboriously, from decade to decade, in the 



150 Christian SjJaiji to the Almoravide Conquest. 

infant kingdom. The overthrown cross was set up 
again ; iron priest and dauntless warrior fought side by 
side against the common foe ; the destroyed temple was 
rebuilt ; the devastated field reactivated ; the ruined 
town rehabilitated. Thus it continued in the brief but 
stirring reign of Alfonso II. 's cousin and successor, Ra- 
miro (842-50), who quelled many conspiracies against 
himself ; defeated and burnt seventy ships, belonging to 
the Norman pirates, on the coast of Galicia ; consigned 
wizards to the flames, put out the eyes of robbers, built 
monasteries, contended successfully against Abdera- 
man's armies, and won for himself the name of " the 
Rod of Justice." 

" A cry went through the mountains when the proud Moor drew 
near, 
And trooping to Ramiro came every Christian spear ; 
The blessed Saint Iago, they called upon his name : — 
That day began our freedom, and wiped away our shame." 

Such is the concluding verse of the ballad in which 
Ramiro 's memory is gratefully enshrined. " The reign 
of King Ramiro was short but glorious. He had not 
been many months seated on the throne when Abdera- 
man, the second of that name, sent a formal embassy to 
demand payment of an odious and ignominious tribute, 
which had been agreed to in the days of former and 
weaker princes, but which, it would seem, had not been 
exacted by the Moors, while such men as Bernardo del 
Carpio and Alfonso the Great headed the forces of the 
Christians. This tribute was a hundred virgins pet- 
annum. King Ramiro refused compliance and marched 
to meet the army of Abderaman. The battle was 



The Maiden Tribute. 151 

fought near Alboyda (or Alveida), and lasted for two 
entire days. On the first day the superior discipline of 
the Saracen chivalry had nearly accomplished a com- 
plete victory, when the approach of night separated the 
combatants. During the night, Saint Iago stood in a 
vision before the king, and promised to be with him 
next morning in the field. Accordingly, the warlike 
apostle made his appearance, mounted on a milk-white 
charger, and armed cap-a-pie in radiant mail, like a 
true knight. The Moors sustained a signal defeat, and 
the " Maiden Tribute " was never afterwards paid, al- 
though often enough demanded." 

Ramiro was succeeded by his son, Ordofio I., in 850, 
who devoted his chief care to the restoration and re- 
peopling of the cities abandoned by Alfonso I., defeated 
the rebellious Basques and the Norman pirates (859), 
and died, leaving a pleasant memory to his famous son 
and follower, Alfonso III. 

Alfonso had been associated with his father for four 
years in the government, so that he was not unpre- 
pared to take control of affairs on the death of Ordofio. 
He pressed further into the dominions of the Moors 
than any previous Christian prince. Burgos, the bul- 
wark of Spain against the infidels on the east side, rose 
into prominence during his reign, and he strengthened 
his possessions by the building of numerous fortresses 
and castles. A marriage with Ximene, daughter of 
Garcias Iniguez, brought him into intimate association 
with the reigning house of Navarre. He crossed the 
Duero and conquered the chief towns of Lusitania, 
pushing his conquests to the vicinity of Merida and the 
Sierra Morena. Contending with continual conspiracies 



152 Christian Sj^ain to the Almoravide Conquest, 

instigated by Count Froila and his own brothers, he 
suffered the further mortification of seeing his son 
Garcias and his wife weaving plots against him, and 
finally abdicated in favor of Garcias. The younger 
brother, Ordono, received Galicia ; Froila (Fruella), As- 
tunas ; and Garcias, Leon. Alfonso retired to Santiago 
to hide his wounded feelings in devotion, but came 
forth once more and battled triumphantly against the 
Moors of Toledo, dying, after a reign of forty-four 
years, in 910. 

With Alfonso III. closes the series of purely Asturian 
kings, and Garcias, who took up his residence in Leon, 
was the first king of Leon, as the Christian kings north 
of the Duero thenceforth named themselves. The ori- 
gin of the name of the town dates from the establish- 
ment of the seventh Roman legio (Legio VII. Geminci) 
there, and the town remained stubbornly Roman till 
taken by Leovigild in 585. The Arabs held Leon but 
a short time, and its walls of great and massive strength 
admirably adapted it for being the stronghold of Span- 
ish Christendom as it had been of the Romans. The 
conquests of Alfonso III. had gradually but surely 
moved forward the centre of the Christian power toward 
the centre of the peninsula, and incalculable might have 
been the results, had not, as so often in Spanish history, 
the slowly evolving kingdom been torn by dissensions 
resulting from a division of its resources among the 
three brothers. The consequence was three short and 
tumultuous reigns — Garcias (910-14), Ordono II. 
(914-924), and Froila II. (924-925) — the first of 
whom died childless, the second campaigned success- 
fully against the great Khalif Abderaman III., and the 




CuATiSL. OF TliE ZaINCAKHON, MOSQUE OF CORDOVA 



Ramiro II. 155 

third, supplanting his brother Ordono's children, died 
of leprosy, says the chronicle, after a reign of fourteen 
months. 

Alfonso IV., the Blind, or the monk, a son of Ordofio 
II., grasped the sceptre with weak and vacillating hand, 
between 925 and 930. Devoted to pious exercises, he 
abdicated in favor of his brother Ramiro II. (931-95°)* 
retired to the convent of Sahagun (Domnos Sanctos), 
repented of his abdication, flew to arms while Ramiro 
was fighting the Saracens, was defeated and blinded, 
and died, leaving a memory compounded of bigotry, 
irresolution, and duplicity. 

The chroniclers pass over the nineteen years of the 
reign of Ramiro II. in almost absolute silence. The 
count of Castile, Fernan Gonzalez, and the Castilian 
grandee, Diego Munoz, revolted against Ramiro, were 
defeated and imprisoned, and released under oath of alle- 
giance to the king of Leon. Ordofio married his eldest 
son Ordofio to Urraca, Gonzalez' daughter, won a bril- 
liant victory over the infidels at Talavera, left numerous 
monastic establishments as memorials of his religions 
faith, and died in 950, leaving the throne to his eldest 
son Ordofio III., a prince of distinguished resolution, 
caution, valor, and experience. His brother Sancho, 
aided by the refractory count of Castile, rebelled 
against him ; but the proclamation of the "holy war" 
against the Christians by Abderaman united the Span- 
iards, and gave them a glorious success on the banks of 
the Duero. Sancho I. (the Fat), followed his brother 
in 957, but was soon driven into exile by the ambitious 
and unmanageable Fernan Gonzalez, who was bent on 
securing the independence of Castile. Sancho .took 



156 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

refuge with the noble-minded Khalif of Cordova, was 
cured of his excessive corpulency by the skill of the 
Arabian physicians, and, assisted by Abderaman's 
troops, expelled the pretender, Ordofio the Bad, from 
Leon, forced him into exile among the Moslems, and 
finally succumbed himself to a poisoned apple sent him 
by count Gonzalo Sanchez of Galicia, in 966. Dona 
Elvira, aunt of the five-year-old heir to the crown, Ram- 
iro III. (966-982), a woman of great wisdom and ability, 
managed the kingdom during the minority of her nephew, 
and destroyed a Norman fleet of one hundred vessels, 
which had ravaged Galicia and the sea-coast. A nar- 
row-minded, mendacious, and arrogant stripling, Ramiro 
III. totally estranged the affections of his people ; the 
grandees rebelled and offered the crown to Bermudo 
II., the Gouty (982-999), — a vigorous though physi- 
cally ailing spirit, celebrated for the misfortunes which 
his government underwent at the hands of the terrible 
Almansor. His own nobles called the Moors into the 
land, stole and divided his treasures, caused the de- 
struction of his capital and innumerable villages, 
churches, and cloisters, the desecration of the great 
sanctuary of Santiago by the Moors, and a state of 
pitiable ruin and disaster throughout Christian Spain. 

The destruction and misery were partially obliterated 
by his son, Alfonso V. (999-1028), who rebuilt the walls, 
churches, and convents of Leon, and held there the 
famous council of prelates and grandees in 1020, so 
epoch-making for the legislation of this part of Spain. 
He was slain by an arrow during the siege of Viseu, on 
the Mondego, in 1028. 

The curse of mediaeval Spain perpetually recurs, — long 



Bermudo's Minority. 157 

minorities of her princes, during which the country is 
delivered over to the heartless intrigues of the nobles. 
Bermudo III. (i 028-1 037) had this hapless experience, 
saw his capital taken away from him by the ambitious 
and powerful Sancho Mayor, king of Navarre, — who 
reigned from the summit of the Pyrenees to the bounda- 
ries of Galicia, — and only after the latter's death in 1035, 
re-appeared as king of Leon. Sancho had conquered 
Castile, and left his kingdom in such a way that his 
son Garcias held possession of Navarre with Alava; 
Ferdinand, Castile, with prospective rights to Leon, 
Galicia, and Asturias, in case Bermudo died without 
children ; and the bastard Ramiro, Aragon. The two 
combined against Bermudo ; a bloody battle ensued, 
and Bermudo, rushing impetuously forward to measure 
lances with his princely enemies, was killed. With him 
the male line of the kings of Leon expired, and, as his 
only son had died soon after birth, Ferdinand therefore 
succeeded to the crown of Leon. 

Whilst a kingdom thus painfully and piece-meal rose 
in the west of the peninsula, a little state, or confed- 
eracy of states, began a similar line of development in 
the east. 

The spirit of the eastern population of Spain had 
always been singularly fresh and stirring. The climate, 
the situation of the land, and the intimate association 
with France, stimulated these small countyships and prin- 
cipalities wonderfully. Thus between the protecting 
Pyrenees and the Mediterranean, in Catalonia, rose a 
nationality whose fundamental tone was Gothic and 
Spanish, yet whose constituent elements were so com- 



158 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

plex, owing to foreign influence, and wide-extended 
commercial relations abroad and at home, that the 
nationality as a whole came to form an easy transition 
between sharply individualized Spain and the more cos- 
mopolitan spirit of Italy, France, and Germany. 

The earliest history of the province of Barcelona is 
closely bound up with that of the south of France. The 
" Spanish March " separated, with Septimania, from the 
kingdom given by the Emperor Louis to his son Pippin, in 
the south of France, embraced the four dioceses of Barce- 
lona, Gerona, Urgel, and Ausona. It extended beyond 
the limits of Vasconia and embraced counties belonging 
later to Aragon. Barcelona was the capital, and the 
counts of Barcelona, called by their contemporaries 
also dukes of Barcelona, w T ere at once counts of the 
March of Spain, and dukes of Septimania. Their task 
was to watch and protect this important borderland 
(hence march, or mark) against the menacing growth of 
the Saracens. Their remoteness from the central 
authority and their power were so great that they soon 
coveted and effected their independence. About 865 
Septimania was separated from the county of Barcelona. 
Wifrid the Hairy is the first count after the separation 
that offers any certain point about which to group his- 
torical facts. It is not, however, till the great name of 
the Berenguers is reached, in the eleventh century, that 
Catalonia, so-called by a Pisan chronicler in 11 14, 
assumes decided importance in the affairs of the 
country. 

Raymond Berenguer I. was grandson of Raymond, 
whose reign, with that of his brother, extended from 977 
to 1017, a period filled with the splendid achievements 



Laics of Barcelona. 159 

of Almansor and marked by the acme and decline of 
the Mahometan K'halifate of Cordova. Under the 
princes of this name, both Raymonds and Raymond 
Berenguers, the county swiftly progressed in internal 
development and external extent (1076). Under Ray- 
mond Berenguer I., were promulgated those remarkable 
usages or laws of Barcelona which, for seven hundred 
years, formed the foundation of the civil administration 
of Catalonia. In thus giving his land its peculiar leg- 
islation, Raymond was equally intent upon insuring its 
independence within and without. It is said that he 
acquired such supremacy over the Moslems that twelve 
kings (emirs and waits) of Spain paid annual tribute to 
him as to their lord. He sullied the brightness of his 
honor, however, by accepting gold from the infidels, 
exciting Christians against Christians, shedding the blood 
of his people in the cause of fugitive and shameless Mos- 
lems, and playing the allies of the infidels in their civil 
wars against one another, for the aggrandizement of him 
self. He died in 1076 (as did his son Raymond Beren- 
guer II. in 1092), while on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. 
The third of the name extended the territory and re- 
sources of his land more than either of his predecessors, 
and united, by inheritance, with Barcelona the counties 
of Cerdagne, Berga, and Conflant, Capcir, and a part of 
Rasez (iin-1117). Marriage with Dolce, countess of 
Aries or Provence, in n 12, brought him other extensive 
possessions north of the Pyrenees ; and he assumed the 
title of count of Barcelona and Spain, Besalu, and 
Provence. 

His conquest of Majorca in union with the Pisan 
fleet, in 11 14-1 115, resulted in the liberation of thirty 



160 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, 

thousand captive Christians on one clay ; but the con- 
quest was soon lost. Throwing off ecclesiastical alle- 
giance to the archbishop of Narbonne, on the' other 
side of the Pyrenees, he erected Tarragona into an arch- 
bishopric, and made of it the metropolitan see, after the 
conquest of Saragossa from the Moslems in 1118. En- 
tering the order of the Templars, he dedicated himself 
indefatigably to knightly encounters with the " accursed 
sons of Mahoun." On his death, in 1131, he left the 
Spanish March, with all its belongings, to his eldest son, 
Raymond Berenguer IV., and to the youngest, Beren- 
guer Raymond, Provence and his possessions in Ro- 
vergne, Gevaudan, and Carlad. In 1137 the Spanish 
March was united with Aragon, and began at once a 
new and interesting period.* 

* As the accounts of the early history of Barcelona, Na- 
varre, Castile, Aragon, and the Asturias are conflicting, I have 
preferred to follow Lembke I., Schafer II. , and Dozy, Kecherches, 
I. and II. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CHRISTIAN SPAIN TO THE ALMORAVIDE CONQUEST. 

[continued.] 

ONLY once, hitherto, under Sancho the Great, was 
it permitted to Navarre to play a striking part in 
the affairs of Spain. Its precipice-guarded mountain- 
land was favorable to independence, though eyed with 
covetousness by the foreigner, as a borderland and en- 
trance into the peninsula. Navarre had been the gate- 
way of the Saracens into France, and became the guide 
of France into Spain. The early and marvellous ex- 
pansion of Leon and Castile had, however, prevented 
Navarre from becoming a great power. Fortunate cir- 
cumstances had enabled Sancho the Great to exercise 
an evanescent lordship from Pampelona down over 
almost the whole of Catholic Spain. But his short- 
sighted division of his kingdom among his sons, put 
the finishing blow to a lasting preponderance of his 
kingdom, and in the bosom of the Pyrenees created 
Aragon, which soon overshadowed the motherland. 

Pampelona and Navarre were ruled by counts, or 
dukes dependent upon the Frankish kings until they 
cast off the yoke, aided by their difficult position and 
the weakness and neglect of the Frankish overlords. 

The hardy and warlike Basques were perpetually in 
revolt against their own rulers and the kings of Asturias 

163 



164 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

and Leon. The marriage of Alfonso III. (866-910) 
with Ximene, a daughter of Garcias Iniguez, who de- 
duced his origin from Peter, duke of Cantabria, of the 
Visigothic royal house, shows at least the existence of 
an important independent reigning house in Navarre, 
and a land sundered both from the Frankish and the 
Asturian kingdom in the latter part of the ninth century. 
Though Garcias Iniguez does not seem to have been a 
king, his daughter married a king, and his son, Sancho 
Garcias (s or -z is a patronymic ending of descent), took 
the kingly title in 905. He conquered Pampelona and 
the whole domain of Aragon, with its castles ; snatched 
all the fortified places, from Naxera to Tudela on the 
Cantabrian side, from the Saracens ; and at his death, in 
925, left his kingdom clean of the misbelievers. His 
son Garcias reigned from 925 to 970, and "fought 
many battles with the Saracens," laconically register 
the chronicles. Of his two sons, Sancho and Ramiro, 
the first, as king of Navarre, through conquest, mar- 
riage, and skilful utilization of favorable circumstances^ 
gave his realm an extent and importance unrivalled in 
the annals of Navarre by predecessor or successor. 
After the murder of the Castilian count Garcias, the 
king of Navarre, as son-in-law of count Sancho, got 
possession of Castile, and occupied in Leon, the region 
between the rivers Pisuerga and Cea. His division of 
the kingdom before his death in 1035, has already been 
mentioned. Garcias, the first-born, got Navarre, with 
Viscaya, hitherto united with Catalonia ; Ferdinand, 
Castile and the land between the Cea and the Pisuerga ; 
and Ramiro, a natural son, the countyship of Aragon. 
The little countyship of Aragon, originally such a 



Rise of Aragon. 165 

speck on the map of Spain, possesses an interest in 
political history second only to that of Catalonia. 
The situation and nature of the two lands are not more 
different than the psychological peculiarities of their 
inhabitants. The vivid-minded Catalonian, absorbed 
in municipal life and industrial pursuits, turned towards 
the brilliant and animated Mediterranean, and thence 
wafted to every part of the world, devoted to sea-faring 
and sea-trade, lively, poetic, and chivalrous, forms the 
most utter contrast with the Aragonese, bred in his lonely 
mountains and valleys, everlastingly and fiercely fight- 
ing with the Moors, strange to culture and refinement, 
proudly and stoically secluded, and yet developing, in 
his savage solitude, a code which, in its singularly broad 
and enlightened views of civil liberty, constitutional 
government, and the limitations of power, is rivalled 
only by the great charter wrung from King John of 
England, at Runnymede. 

Darkness shrouds the rise of Aragon as it does that 
of Leon, the Asturias, Castile, and Navarre. The small 
extent of the county, its inaccessible position, and its 
primitive unimportance, make it suffer at the hands of 
the chroniclers. Count Bernard, one of the sons of 
Vaudregisel, a descendant of Eudes, duke of Aquitania, 
was one of the earliest Aragonese " watchers of the 
borderland," in virtue of his marriage with Theuda, 
daughter of Galindo, the count of Aragon. Galindo was 
the second count, and is expressly called the Count of 
Aragon. Originally conquered, with the aid of the 
Franks, by Count Bernard, it was united with Navarre 
by King Sancho Garcias, and fell to the bastard son of 
Sancho the Great, Ramiro, who assumed the title of 



166 christian Spain to the Almoravicle Conquest. 

king, and increased his realm by wars with the Moors, 

and by steady endowment and building up of the great 
mediaeval church organization of Spain. Civil war 
broke out between the three brothers. Garcias fell in 
battle in 1054; his whole territory down to the Ebro 
came into the hands of Ferdinand ; and Ramiro died 
at the siege of Grados in 1063, leaving a son, Sancho 
Ramirez, who completely expelled all the Moors from 
the mountains of Aragon, and from Sobrarbe, Ribagorza, 
and Barbastro, in the plains (1065). The murder of 
King Sancho of Navarre in 1076, by his brother Ray- 
mond, enabled the kings of Castile and Aragon to occupy 
the now confused and headless kingdom. Sancho 
Ramirez therefore gained Pampelona, and Alfonso VI. 
of Castile and Leon occupied Rioja and Calahorra, and 
the provinces Alava, Guipuzcoa, and Biscay. The 
murderer fled to the court of the Emir of Saragossa, 
whose central position, almost in the midst of the Chris- 
tian principalities, enabled him long to hold the balance 
of power in his hands, and become equally formidable 
as foe or ally of his neighbors. Navarre, to the Ebro, 
remained bound up with Aragon till its separation again, 
in 1 134. We find an intensely active guerrilla warfare 
against the Mussulmans carried on all this time, and 
the king, Sancho Ramirez, spread with restless energy 
his conquests further and further to the south, fortify- 
ing his frontier as he went. In 1093 the Christians 
poured like a devastating stream into the Moslem 
domain ; forty thousand armed and unarmed persons 
were slaughtered in the captured towns, and innumer- 
able women and children dragged into captivity. The 
heroic monarch died of a poisoned arrow at the siege 
of Huesca, in 1094. 



Castile. 167 

The capture of Huesca became the persevering task 
of Pedro I., his successor on the throne — a city which 
was the bulwark of the Mahometan power in eastern 
Spain. It surrendered in 1096. The possession of so 
important a place lightened the task of the capture of 
Saragossa, which was accomplished by his successor. 
Pedro died in 1 104 in great repute for justice, ortho- 
doxy, and knightliness. 

About the middle of the eighth century, in the time 
of Alfonso L, what, a century later, was called Castz/e, 
was called Bardulia. Castile, as a name, was al reach- 
familiar in the days of Alfonso III. A few decades 
after, the domain of Castile had so extended that it 
came to be called "Old " Castile in contra-distinction 
to the ever-widening conquests to the south ; the same 
name was applied to the territory of Toledo, afterwards 
acquired by the kings of Leon and Castile, though with 
the designation " New " Castile. The whole land clown 
to the "Puertos de Guadarrama," or "gates of the 
Guadarrama " mountains, was called Old Castile : south- 
wards from this point. New Castile. At one time, how- 
ever, the term "Old" Castile was applied more partic- 
ularly to that domain which constituted the primitive 
seat of the '-county of Castile," and within this domain 
formed the merindad of Villarcayo, as distinguished from 
the territory of Burgos, which was preferably called 
" Castile.** 

Alfonso I. and his successors, as kings of Asturias, 
undoubtedly installed governors over the first conquests 
made in the north of Castile. But the first knowledge 



168 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

we have of "counts" of Castile is of Rodrigo and 
Diego, father and son, the former of whom founded 
Am ay a in 860 as the capital, at that time, of the prov- 
ince, and the latter peopled Burgos, twenty-four years 
later (884). There were numerous counts in the differ- 
ent districts of the country, several of whom Ordono 
caused to be apprehended and put to death for rebel- 
lion in 923, a fact which speaks eloquently for the 
dependence of Castile at that time. From the year 
935 Fernan Gonzalez, one of the most famous and cap- 
tivating of Spanish ballad-figures, appears as single 
count of Castile, striving though unsuccessfully for 
independence against Ramiro II. Ramiro courted his 
friendship, however, by marrying his son to the power- 
ful count's daughter, thinking thus to have woven an in- 
extricable woof of dependence for him. Gonzalez, how- 
ever, — a treacherous and ungovernable grandee, ■ — 
struggled unceasingly in the succeeding reigns of 
Ordono III. and the weak Sancho I., but without avail. 
Castile remained obedient to Leon. 

It was a vast step towards independence, however, 
that his son, Garcia Fernandez, followed him immedi- 
ately in the administration of the province. 

The Count Fernan Gonzalez is the centre of a thou- 
sand radiations of delicate and fantastic poetry, 

They have carried afar into Navarre the great count of Castile, 
And they have bound him sorely, they have bound him hand and 

heel; 
The tidings up the mountains, and down among the valleys, 
"To the rescue! to the rescue, ho! — they have ta'en Fernan 

Gonzalez ! " 



Fernan G-onzalez. 171 

A pilgrim knight of Normandy was riding through Navarre, 
For Christ his hope he came to cope with the Moorish scymitar ; 
To the Alcavde of the tower in secret thus said he : 
"These bezaunts fair with thee I'll share, so I this lord may see." 

Such are the opening lines of one of these charming 
legends so musically rendered by Lockhart, who con- 
tinues : " The story of Fernan Gonzalez is detailed in 
the Coronica Antigua de Espana with so many romantic 
circumstances, that certain modern critics have been 
inclined to think it entirely fabulous. Of the main 
facts recorded, there seems, however, to be no good 
reason to doubt ; and it is quite certain that from the 
earliest times the name of Fernan Gonzalez has been 
held in the highest honor by the Spaniards themselves 
of every degree. He lived at the beginning of the 
tenth century. It was under his rale, according to the 
chronicles, that Castile first become an independent 
Christian state, and it was by his exertions that the first 
foundations were laid of that system of warfare by 
which the Moorish power in Spain was at last over- 
thrown. 

" He was so fortunate as to have a wife as heroic as 
himself, and both in the chronicles and in the ballads, 
abundant justice is done to her merits. 

,; She twice rescued Fernan Gonzalez from confine 
ment, at the risk of her own life. He asked, or designed 
to ask, her hand in marriage of her father, Garcias, king 
of Navarre, and was on his way to that prince's court, 
when he was seized and cast into a dungeon, in conse- 
quence of the machinations of his enemy, the queen of 
Leon, sister to the king of Navarre. Sancha, the 
young princess, to whose alliance he had aspired, being 



172 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest 

informed of the cause of his journey, and of the suffer- 
ings to which it had exposed him, determined at all 
hazards to effect his liberation ; and having done so,, by 
bribing his jailer, she accompanied his flight to Castile. 
Many years after, he fell into an ambush prepared for 
him by the same implacable enemy, and was again a 
fast prisoner in Leon. His countess, feigning a pil- 
grimage to Compostella, obtained leave, in the first 
place, to pass through the hostile territory, and after- 
wards in the course of her progress, to spend one night 
in the castle where her husband was confined. She 
exchanged clothes with him ; and he was so fortunate 
as to pass in his disguise through the guards who 
attended on him." 

Under Count Sancho, grandson of Fernan Gonzalez, 
the foundation was laid for the complete independence 
of Castile, by the marriage of his daughter to Sancho of 
Navarre. On the murder of his son and heir, Garcias, 
by the Vela brothers at the church door (1026), the 
Castilian male line became extinct, and the king of 
Navarre claimed Castile in virtue of his being the 
brother-in-law of the deceased. Then Bermudo III., 
king of Castile and Leon, gave his sister Sancha in 
marriage to Ferdinand, second son of the king of 
Navarre, with cession of the land between the Cea and 
Pisuerga. After that time Castile began to grow up 
into an independent kingdom. Ferdinand became 
count of Castile, which fell to him as hereditary posses- 
sion on Sancho's division of the three kingdoms at his 
death. 

After Ferdinand I.'s coronation as king of Leon and 
Castile, he ruled over lands extending: from the coast 



Ferdinand of Leon and Castile. 173 

of Galicia to the borders of Navarre — a power which 
roused great apprehensions among the Moslems. To 
win over the Leonese, he resorted to the favorite means 
of reconciliation of the early Spanish kings — a means 
out of which grew the whole marvellous fabric of early 
Spanish liberties and prerogatives, — confirmed theirown 
fueros or laws, and added new ones to these. The 
great assembly of Coyanza held in 1050, was of strik- 
ing significance for the subsequent civil and ecclesiasti- 
cal legislation at Castile. Ferdinand devoted special 
attention to the education of his sons, had them in- 
structed in the sciences, in arms, riding, and the chase, 
and his daughters grew up with all the ornaments of 
womanhood. His states flourished under his sagacious 
administration and he triumphed over his unnatural 
brother, Garcias of Navarre, in 1054, when Garcias fell 
mortally wounded in' battle. The usual interminable 
war against the Moslems was religiously maintained. 
At the assembly held in Leon about 1063-4 he com- 
mitted the fatal error, oblivious of the evil effects of 
his father's example, of parcelling out his realm among 
his three sons and two daughters. Alfonso, whom he 
loved best, was to have Leon and Asturias ; Sancho, the 
eldest, Castile ; Garcias, the youngest. Galicia . and the 
daughters, Urraca, and Elvira the cities of Zamora and 
Toro, with the patronage of all the convents in the 
kingdom, on condition of remaining unwedded. (Both 
died about 1101). The most notable achievement of his 
late old age was the siege and capture of the populous 
city of Coimbra ; and he lived to see the Emirs of To- 
ledo, Seville, Badajoz. and Saragossa in a certain 
dependence on him. Feeling his end approaching, he 



174 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest, 

put on the royal vestments, had himself borne to the 
church of San Juan, prayed aloud humbly before the 
assembled dignitaries, removed the royal insignia, and 
putting on the penitential garment died in the arms of 
the priest, in 1065. 

Love for his children had thus caused Ferdinand to 
sow seeds of discord which did not fail to bring forth 
an hundred fold. An ignoble strife broke out between 
Alfonso and Sancho ; Sancho seized his brother's 
dominions, banished Alfonso to Toledo, and drove Gar- 
cias into exile. Only a single town and a single woman 
ventured to withstand his resistless arms — the Lady 
Urraca of Zamora, the elder sister — a quaint and in- 
finitely attractive profile, as she peeps out of the old 
ballads and throws her delicate body athwart all this 
stormy tumult. Sancho besieged Zamora and was mur- 
dered there by one of the knights of the town (1072) ; 
whereupon his ready-witted sister sent post-haste to 
Alfonso in Toledo, where he had been entertained with 
boundless hospitality by the Emir. Alfonso recovered 
his estates as expeditiously as he had lost them, granted 
privileges to his people, — among them the abolition of 
the burdensome way-toll exacted of ail pilgrims jour- 
neying to the shrine of Santiago de Compostella, — 
cast his brother Garcias into lifelong imprisonment, 
and thus secured to himself control over Galicia. 

Tt was partly in his days— a hundred years after all Spain 
had rung with the romantic story of the "seven most 
noble brothers called the infants of Lara"— that the 
celebrated Cid, champion of Spain, did those wonder- 
ful deeds whose echoes die away with the century as 
they mingle with the on-coming shout of the soldiers of 
the first crusade. 



The Cid CampeaAor. 177 

Rodrigo Diaz cle Biyar, the Cid Campeador, was the 
only one of the Spanish heroes who acquired a Euro- 
pean reputation in the middle ages. The poets of all 
times sang and celebrated him. The most ancient 
monument of Castilian poetry bears his name ; more 
than one hundred and fifty ballads celebrate his loves 
and combats ; Guillen de Castro. Diamante, Corneilie, 
and others, chose him as the hero of their dramas, and 
Herder, Sou they, and Frere have made him a household 
word by the firesides of Germany and England. His 
name became the kernel and clustering-point of innum- 
erable fictions. 

The marriage contract of Rodrigo and Ximene and 
a few lines of a Latin Chronicle, written in the south of 
France forty-two years after his death (1141), are all 
the documentary testimony we possess contemporary 
with, or slightly posterior to, the Cid. The other sources 
of his history are subsequent to 12 12. 

According to the Arabian chronicle, the Cid was a 
professional highwayman whose business it was to chain 
prisoners ; he was the scourge of the country ; he 
entered the pay of the Mussulman kinglets, who sur- 
rendered to him various provinces of the peninsula, so 
that he traversed the country with impunity and planted 
his banner over their finest cities. His power was im- 
mense, and there was said to be no district of Spain 
which he had not pillaged. He laid siege to Valencia, 
captured it, and established himself there, where he 
died in 1099. At different times he fought against Gar- 
cias of the Crooked Mouth, the count of Barcelona, 
and the descendants of Raymond, putting their oume r 
ous wamors to Sight wich his small band of tried az&i 



178 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

invincible soldiers. He delighted in the deeds and gestes 
of the ancient chevaliers of Arabia, and when they read 
to him the story of Mohallab, he was in ecstasy and full 
of admiration for that dextrous hero. He served the 
Mahometan kings or emirs of Saragossa. The history 
of his achievements fills more than a half of the last 
part of the Cronica General — that matchless record 
drawn up in the second half of the thirteenth century 
by Alfonso X., surnamed the Learned, which, as Livy's 
book with regard to Roman history, was a digest of 
countless Latin chronicles and Spanish poems, with their 
assonances still clinging to them in many cases. Alfonso 
X. was the creator of " the true Castilian prose, — the 
prose of the good old times, the prose that expresses so 
faithfully the Spanish character, — that vigorous, broad, 
rich, grave, and noble prose.'' It is believed that he 
knew the Arabic, and translated from it the unflattering 
account which he gives of the Cid. The famous knight 
was called Mio Cid (my lord), a name given to him by 
his Arab soldiers and his Yalencian subjects, and the. 
term Campcador applied to him, did not mean champion 
— a technical term, of infamous repute, for a man who 
went from place to place, to hire out his services in 
judicial combats — but a duellej-, a term borrowed by 
the Spaniards from the Arabs, to signify one who, like 
David, went forth when two armies met, and defied the 
preux of the other side to single combat. Such was 
his position in the army of Sancho of Castile to whom 
he was standard-bearer. 

The date of the Song of the Cid has been fixed as of 
not higher antiquity than the beginning of the thir- 
teenth centurv, and in its verses, varying from eight to 



Ximene the Heroic. 179 

twenty-four syllables in length, we have a brilliant, pa- 
thetic, and marvellously naive account of his wrongs ; 
his marriage with the daughter of the man he had slain, 
his solemn binding of Alfonso under oath that he had 
not killed Sancho : the king's bitter enmity to the Cid 
thereupon ; his banishment ; the story of Bavieca, his 
wonderful horse ; the marriage of his daughters to the 
Infants of Carrion, who insulted and scourged them, 
leaving them bleeding in the wood ; the starving and 
storming of Valencia ; the touching legend of the Leper • 
the dazzling visions that he had on his death-bed, his 
death, and the story of how the heroic Ximene bound 
him erect on Bavieca, and carried him, a corpse in 
armor, holding his glittering sword, to Burgos. 

Ximene was the daughter of Diego, count of Oviedo, 
and cousin of Alfonso, who wished by marriage to 
attach Rodrigo to his family, though he had conceived 
an aversion to him. On Rodrigo's attacking the Moors 
in 1 08 1 without asking his permission, Alfonso banished 
him, and from this moment the Cid became the condot- 
//>r<?-in-chief of the peninsula marauders. He terrorized 
the country of the enemies of his master, Montamin 
Emir of Saragossa ; Montamin overwhelmed him with 
presents and distinctions ; but the Cid, hungering after 
the pardon and recognition of his old master, as it 
would seem, tried in 1084 to open negotiations. Al- 
fonso received him honorably, but his secret rancor 
soon got the better of his prudence, and the Cid found 
it advisable to return to Saragossa. 

Alfonso made no scruple of selling his people and 
their states. He sold Valencia — which he was not in 
possession of then — to Moctodir of Saragossa for 



180 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

one hundred thousand gold pieces ; then nine years 
later to Cadir, on condition that the Mussulman prince 
would hand over to him Toledo, the ancient capital of 
the Visigoths. Alfonso held his entry into the city in 
1085, while Cadir exposed himself to the ridicule of 
Mussulmans and Christians by spying out on an astro- 
labe the hour propitious for his departure. 

The chaos into which the Mussulman principalities 
had fallen on the dissolution of the Khalifate, fifty years 
before, was for a moment reorganized by the arrival of the 
Almoravide king of Morocco, Yousof-ibn-Techoufin, 
whom the Andalusian princes had called into the land 
to their help against Alfonso. In the celebrated battle 
of Zallacca, fought in 1086, the " emperor " Alfonso was 
shamefully beaten. 

The Cid meanwhile had made an arrangement with 
Mostain of Saragossa, his new employer, to rid Valen- 
cia of the miserable despot Cadir ; with infinite du- 
plicity he secretly negotiated with Cadir, then with 
Alfonso, whose vassal Cadir was, then with Cadir again. 
At the head of an independent robber band, he de- 
stroyed churches, devastated fields, stormed fortresses, 
loaded Berenguer of Aragon with insults (whom after- 
wards he profoundly touched by his generosity), com- 
pelled the petty sovereigns of Barcelona, Valencia. 
Albarracin, Alpuente, Murviedro, and Saragossa to pur 
chase his protection at the rate of thousands of golden 
azndrs, and virtually possessed Valencia long before its 
surrender, in 1094, but a few years after the mighty 
king of Morocco had once more blended the swarming 
republics and kingdoms of the south into a powerful 
sovereignty, and created the Almoravide dynasty to last 



Birth, of Oastilian Poesy. 181 

a hundred years. It is said that the Cid died broken- 
hearted over the defeat of his chosen troops by the 
Almoravides in 1099. In 1102 the Almoravides took 
possession of the beautiful city. 

The death of the Cid seems to have been the birth 
of Castilian poesy — a poesy as different as possible 
from that of the polished, ingenious, and impression- 
able Moors, who haunted palaces, delighted in commen- 
taries, and sent messages of battle or reconciliation in 
verse characterized by an incomparable poetic technique. 
The Castilian popular verse clung faithfully to reality ; 
it was full of dreams of national grandeur obscurely 
foreshadowed ; it deified, with an intuitive political 
sense, the great champion of the people and opponent 
of an unjust ruler ; it transformed an historic king, half 
a century after his death, into an idealized and half-fab- 
ulous hero, burdening him with the agony of its own 
poetic dreams. The Cid was the incarnation of his 
times. Fighting now for Christ and now for Mahomet ; 
guilty of infamous treasons ; breaking solemn oaths ; 
burning prisoners ; having no word in his vocabulary 
that would express patriotism ; lying without scruple ; a 
powerful chieftain who had conquered a principality for 
himself ; he was no worse and no better than the Ber- 
n'ado del Carpios, the Fernan Gonzalezes, or than many 
a king among his contemporaries. 

There were three Cids : the cavalier, who could right 
better than all others, who protected and governed his 
king when he was not fighting him, brutally vigorous 
and frank, inaccessible to tender feeling, a violator of 
holy places ; then a nobler, loyaller, chivalric, Christian 
Cid, who grew out of the impassioned reveries and 



182 Christian Spain to the Almoravide Conquest. 

reminiscences of the author of the Song of the Cid in 
1 200 — a champion fervently adoring the Eternal, 
blessed with visions of archangels, absolutely devoted 
to king and fatherland, full of fatherly tenderness for 
his daughters, Dona Elvira and Dona Sol, full of dig- 
nity and glory arising from a consciousness of just 
deeds and chivalrous enterprises, the noblest type of 
love, honor, religion, patriotism, and knightliness ; and, 
lastly, tfre Cid of the romanceros of the sixteenth century, 
who is a sort of Cid galant, overflowing with fine talk 
and sentimental rhodomontade. A convent of Bene- 
dictine monks, at San Pedro de Cardegna, devoted them- 
selves to his memory, because there he was buried, and 
there were found his tomb, his banner, his buckler, his 
cup of violet-colored crystal, and his cross. They shed 
sweet odors round his spirit, which wrought miracles 
and caused the rains of heaven to inundate the blazing 
fields of Castile. In the popular opinion he became 
more and more of a saint. Bits of his coffin were 
eagerly sought as preservatives against the perils of 
war. And Philip II., — who, it was said, had the Cid been 
his contemporary, would have had him burnt by the 
inquisition as a sacrilegious heretic ; who, even in his 
grave-vault, wore the Arabic costume and was more of 
a Mahometan than a Christian, — Philip II. claimed his 
canonization at the hands of the pope — the canoniza- 
tion of the man who was the boldest and bitterest 
champion of that liberty which it was the life -task of 
Philip to exterminate. 




YOUNG VALENCIANS 



?Sl 



CHAPTER IX. 

FROM THE ALMORAVIDE CONQUEST TO FERDI- 
NAND AND ISABELLA. 

THE task of unravelling the complicated threads 
of the Spanish dynasties and then twining them 
together in a clear and harmonious whole, is one of 
some difficulty ; and it is hard to fix the reader's atten- 
tion on so many radiating lines of development until 
they all converge and coalesce in the persons of Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella. The numerous Alfonsos, the con- 
fusing Sanchos, the series of Ferdinands, Juans, and 
Pedros, often contemporaries though reigning over dif- 
ferent kingdoms ; the five-fold, almost simultaneous 
development of Catalonia, Aragon, Navarre, Asturias 
with Leon and Castile, and, later on, the western king- 
dom of Portugal ; together with the perpetual dissolv- 
ing and recombining panorama of Saracenic Spain, 
with its Khalifate, kingdoms, and short-lived republics ; 
tend to bewilder and overwhelm the student. Fortu- 
nately, however, the history of Spain is full of illumina- 
ted points, to which, in the general darkness the eye 
may turn, and around which cluster the true destinies 
of the country. These are great battles and illustrious 
reigns — Xeres de la frontera, Zallaca, Las Navas de 

'8S 



186 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

Tolosa, Alarcos — events epoch-making in their far- 
reaching consequences, which both reader and writer 
welcome as lighthouses and lode-stars. 

Such, at present, was the battle of Zallaca, fought in 
1086, between Yousof, king of Morocco, and Alfonso 
VI., " emperor of Castile," and his allies, Sancho Ram- 
irez of Aragon and Navarre, and Raymond Berengucr 
of Barcelona. Alfonso's army, the noblest that Spain 
had ever seen, was cut to pieces, and the "emperor" 
himself barely escaped with five hundred cavaliers out 
of a reputed strength of one hundred thousand. The 
conquest of Seville by Yousof in 1091, followed by that 
of the Balearic Isles, gave the whole of Mussulman 
Spain to the Almoravides. In three years the barba- 
rous hordes of Africa, called in by a fatal oversight to 
oppose the great and admirable genius of Alfonso, 
extirpated the " rootless sovereignties " of the south, 
and re-established a Mahometan empire like that of the 
Omaiyades, only on a broader basis. Alfonso's inac- 
tivity was ascribed to his expeditions against Lisbon 
and Santarem, which he gave in feoff to his son-in-law, 
Count Henry of Besancon, Burgundian founder of the 
kingdom of Portugal. 

The year 1099, famous for the capture of Jerusalem 
by the crusaders, was locally celebrated in Spain as the 
death-year of the Cid. 

The death of Yousof, in his hundredth year (11 06), — 
the great general who mingled cruelty, perfidy, ingrati- 
tude, and iron insensibility with the strange virtues of 
religious enthusiasm and humility, — whom two-thirds of 
Spain and half of Africa obeyed as sole sovereign ; 
whose realms reached from Fraga to Cadiz, and from 



" Give me my Son ! " 1ST 

Tunis and Tangier to the golden mountains of the 
negroes ; whom thirteen emirs saluted as " Prince of the 
Faithful," and for whom prayers were said in nineteen 
thousands pulpits — the death of Yousof for a moment 
shook the Almoravide supremacy ; but it speedily set- 
tled in the quiet possession of AH, Yousof s son, like 
Abderaman III., the son of a Christian woman. 

Alfonso VI. died in 1109, broken hearted at the death 
of his only son, Sancho, son of a daughter of the emir 
of Seville by an illegitimate union. He had no male 
heir by his six lawful wives, the first of whom was 
Agathe, daughter of William the Conqueror. Don San- 
cho was killed at the disaster of Uccles, twenty-two 
years after the defeat of Zallaca. The story of his death, 
and of his aged father's grief, is infinitely touching. 
"Alas, my son!" — we translate from the Galician le- 
gend of Sandoval — " alas, my son ! joy of my heart and 
light of my eyes, solace of my old age ! alas, my mirror, 
in whom I was wont to see myself, and in whom I took 
very great delight ! O, my heir ! — cavaliers, where have 
ye left him ? Give me my son, counts ! " And he 
went on repeating, " Give me my son, counts ! " 

It is from the reign of Alfonso VI. that dates the 
true greatness of Castile, which, from his time on, as- 
cended steadily to the first rank of the peninsular states. 
Twice vanquished, and thirty-nine times victor, Alfonso 
was called the " Buckler of Faith," and named himself 
" Imperator Hesperiae.'' At his death, the water flowed 
for three clays from the foot of the altar of Saint Isi- 
dore of Leon, as if the stones themselves had to shed 
tears ! 

The death of Pedro I. in 1104, left the crown of Ara 



188 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

gon vacant to his brother, Alfonso I., the real source of 
the power of Aragon. Alfonso had married the eldest 
daughter of Alfonso VI. of Castile, Doha Urraca. — a 
sanguinary termagant, whose licentious amours, violence, 
and recklessness place her upon the most unenviable 
pedestal of historic viragoes. The Latin of the chron- 
icles becomes piquantly ungrammatical in its naive de- 
lineations of this " sceleratissima vipera," as it calls 
her, and her whole reign — she died in 1126 — is con- 
densed by one of them in these words: "Tyraniiice et 
muliebriter regnavit! " she reigned like a woman and a 
tyrant. It took all the virtues of Isabel the Catholic to 
wipe out the memory of the vices of Urraca. The in- 
terminable feuds of the great houses of the Laras and 
the Castros added to the horrors of the minority of Al- 
fonso VII., the Emperor, for whom Urraca. as his 
mother, held the kingdom in trust. 

Meanwhile the knell of the Almoravide dynasty had 
rung. Out of the depths of Africa, that seething caul- 
dron of religious ideas and revolutions, arose the Ma- 
kadi, Abdallah ibn-Toumert, "whose father lighted the 
lamps in a mosque," and who himself was to light the 
funeral pyre of the Almoravides. He called himself 
the Messiah, announced for ages as the saviour of men, 
and in 1120, began to propagate his doctrine of a puri- 
fied Islamism restored to its primitive simplicity. His 
sect called the Ahnohades (Unitarians), spread with won- 
derful rapidity in the fierce and easily fecundated air of 
Africa. Abdallah associated with himself a man of 
noble mien and commanding presence, Abdelmoumen, 
whose business it was to fight the battles of the Ahno- 
hades while Abdallah, with flashing eyes and strange 



Abdelmoumen' a End. 189 

eloquence promulgated the gospel of his belief. Abdel- 
moumen, by his remarkable talents as a general, routed 
the troops of All and became Emir of Africa. The 
fortune of the Almoravides declined, also, in the penin- 
sula, under Tachfin, Ali's son ; for the Almoravides 
had become odious to the Andalusian Mussulmans and 
Spain was ripe for a revolt. The fate of Tachfin was 
to die by falling over a precipice in Africa, in 1145. 
Purchasing the neutrality of Alfonso, the redoubtable 
enemy of their faith, the Andalusians shook off the yoke 
of the Almoravides. Thirty thousand Almohades, how- 
ever, sent by Abdelmoumen to pave the way to the con- 
quest of Spain, disembarked at Algesiras, in n 46 ; the 
Almoravides sought a last refuge in the island of Ma- 
jorca (11 57) ; and the Almohades triumphed definitively 
over their foes in Andalusia in the same year, ever mem- 
orable for the death of Abdelmoumen's renowned rival 
in fortune and glory, the Emperor Alfonso VII., which 
took place in a last enterprise against the Saracens. 
His death contributed more than anything else to estab- 
lish the domination of the Almohades, accomplished, it 
would seem, without the presence of their chief; but 
the death of Abdelmoumen in 1162, gave a great shock 
to the recently established kingdom. The last years of 
Abdelmoumen's life were consecrated to the administra- 
tion of his vast dominions, now stretching from the Nile 
to the ocean ; and in them he introduced an order rare- 
ly known under the purely personal sovereignty of the 
Commanders of the Faithful. He had his possessions 
skilfully surveyed, as a basis for an exact taxation, 
founded manufactories of arms, and built an immense 
fleet. The empire founded by him was one of the most 



190 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

powerful that ever dominated the world of Islam, and 
its character in Spain was less brutal than that of the 
Almoravide supremacy had been. The Emir himself 
was a singular mixture of grandeur and pettiness ; sub- 
tle, bloodthirsty, pitiless, the Arab historians celebrate 
his liberality, eloquence, equity, and learning ; his step 
was full of dignity, and he scorned the sensual luxuries 
of life. 

An illustrative feature of the character of the times 
is shown by the conduct of the ferocious grandee, Rod- 
rigo of Lara, one of the strangest types of the indomi- 
table race of Castilian ricos omcs. He had his prisoners 
harnessed with oxen to the plough, forced them to eat 
grass in the fields and straw in the stables, and drink 
water out of the marshes ; and when he was tired of 
this pastime sent them home naked and despoiled of 
everything they had. 

Alfonso the Fighter, first of the great kings of Aragon, 
seems to have fallen on the champ dolent of Fraga, fighting 
against the Mussulmans. His passion for the fray won 
him the title of EI Batallador, and but for the civil 
wars that desolated his reign, — if Alfonso of Castile and 
Alfonso of Aragon had united their forces, — Spain 
might have been freed, three hundred years before it 
was, from the odious minions of Islam. The Aragon - 
ese hero greatly extended his realm at the expense of 
the Moors, conquered Saragossa, and. on the other side 
of the Pyrenees, had as vassals nearly all the French 
and Basque lords of the frontier. He bequeathed his 
kingdom, for lack of immediate heirs, to the orders of 
St. John, of Jerusalem, and the Holy Sepulchre. The 
cortes refused to execute the king's will, and gave the 



The Lex Visigothorwm. 198 

crown to the monk, Ramiro II., brother of the king. 
Navarre seized the opportunity to throw off the Ara- 
gonese yoke, and elected as its king, Garcia Ramirez, 
called the Restorer, grandson of Sancho III. and the 
Cid. 

We cannot pass over the close of the Castilian mon- 
arch's long and glorious career without a concluding 
word. He died, under an oak by the roadside at Puerto 
de Muradal, in 1157, having reigned over Galicia, in the 
person of Urraca and himself, forty-seven years, forty 
over Leon and Castile, and twenty-two, as " Emperor," 
over all Christian and a part of Mussulman Spain. He 
had during his lifetime given to his son Sancho the 
Well-beloved, Castile and Biscay, and to Ferdinand, 
Leon, Galicia, Estremadura, and the right of suzerainty 
over Portugal. One of his daughters had married the 
young king of Navarre, another, the son of Raymond of 
Aragon, and a third, Louis the Young, king of France. 

At the close of his life he was a mediator among the 
rival princes of Spain, and endeavored to combine all 
the forces of Christianity against its eternal enemy. 
Though he did not give his country monarchical unity, 
he gave it feudal unity, defended the faith zealously, 
enriched the clergy with his gifts without stooping too 
low under their inflexible yoke, and, by his successes 
over the Saracens, opened the way to the speedy con- 
quest of Seville and Cordova. 

As, however, the history of a people is to be found 
much more in its institutions than in the sterile cata- 
loguing of its kings ; as the Gothic realm reflects itself 
in the Lex Visigothorum, and the Arabic in the Koran ; 
so it will be well to glance at the civil and political or- 



194 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

ganization of Christian Spain as mirrored in its fueros 
or charters. 

The ierm ftte> os is here narrowly restricted to the char- 
ters granted by the kings to the cities founded by them, 
or to those whose privileges they wished to confirm or ex- 
tend as an inducement to keep them settled. Unwritten 
fueros, or bodies of customs and usages, existed in Spain 
long before written ones. The first of the written fueros 
seems to have been that of Leon, granted by Alfonso 
V. in 1 020. This is the most ancient monument of 
Spanish jurisprudence. Then came that of Naxera, 
granted by Sancho the Great, of Navarre ; then that of 
Burgos, about 1039 ; but it is especially to Alfonso VI., 
the conqueror of Toledo, that is due the majority of the 
fueros of this golden age of Spanish municipal legisla- 
tion. The famous fuero viejo of Castile was conceded 
by Count Sancho (995-1015) — incontestably the oldest 
of the customary codes, though whether the first writ- 
ten or not is controverted. It reappears, under mani- 
fold forms, all through the municipal history of the 
peninsula. Most of these municipal codes were entirely 
local and derived from custom, and the forum judi- 
cium of the Goths. A wonderful spirit of liberty and 
conciliation prevails through them all, and out of them 
grew that jealous pride of independence so character- 
istic of Mediaeval Spain. They encouraged by special 
concessions the growth of communities, restricted the 
authority of the great lords, augmented the power of 
the throne, recognized the sanctity of the household, 
established equality before the law for all members of a 
community, gave right of asylum and citizenship to 
Jews, carefully regulated taxation, encouraged the growth 



Eternal Dissension*. 195 

of population by branding bachelorhood with igno- 
miny, founded a rigorous penal code for crimes of every 
description ; and thus, under their influence, in the ad- 
vanced and desolate plains of La Mancha and Estre- 
madura, close to the ever-menacing Mussulman, sprang 
up a series of poblacioncs, or communities, clustered 
about castles and fortresses, which became permeated 
with the spirit of freedom, — still in bonds to feudal ob- 
servance, to be sure, but possessed of a power which of- 
fered the surest guarantees against the encroachments of 
the nobles. 

The only thing that held the Christian sovereignties 
of Spain together, the only thing which, after religion, 
they had in common, was the war against the Moors. 
The regularity of this hundreds-of-years-old crusade 
gave to their military habitudes a fixity and prominence 
which it will be well for a moment to examine. 

Spain, divided by eternal dissensions, would have 
sunk beneath the Mussulman yoke, had not certain per- 
manent military organizations been constituted whose 
profession it was to war to the death against the com- 
mon foe. Hence the origin of the three military orders 
of Calatrava, Alcantara, and Santiago, dating from the 
twelfth century, which were suggested, probably, either 
by the Eastern crusades, or by the religious and military 
system of the Rahbit, or guardians of the frontier. 
under the Omaiyade empire. Such organizations be- 
came a military necessity, and were encouraged in 1 122, 
by Alfonso the Fighter, who bequeathed his kingdom to 
the Hospitallers of St. John, and the Knights of the Holy 
Sepulchre. They settled in great numbers in Aragon. 
about 1 143, whence they spread to Castile. The order 



196 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

of Santiago grew out of a band of penitent robbers in 
1160, who wished in this way by implacable warfare 
against the infidels, to expiate their crimes ; and this 
was preceded and followed by others. 

An auxiliary system of Almogavares or scouts, Ada- 
lides or guides, and Alfaqucques or dragomans, used in 
interpreting and the redemption of prisoners, assisted 
the armies in their campaigns. Thus Spain distin- 
guished itself from feudal Europe, no less by its pecu- 
liar military organization than by its free growth of the 
individual and the community, each more or less sub- 
ject to the feudal classifications, but both modifying their 
inflexible character by an elective principle, a conscious- 
ness of individual worth, a Germanic sense of manhood 
unknown to contemporary Europe. We find the Span- 
ish comunero soldier and citizen at once ; electing his 
counsellors in the community and his chiefs on the field 
of battle ; and the kinship between him and the free 
Gothic warrior is strong enough. 

The division of his kingdom by the emperor, between 
his sons Sancho of Castile and Ferdinand of Leon, 
greatly enfeebled the ascendency which the first of these 
states had begun to exercise over Christian Spain. 
Sancho's death in 11 58 delivered Castile over to a mi- 
nority of ten years, in the person of his young son, Al- 
fonso VIII., called the Little King — a period of anarchy 
and intrigue, fortunately closed in 1170 by a truce with 
Navarre, and a closer alliance with Aragon, against Al- 
fonso's uncle, Ferdinand II. Eighteen years after, 
Ferdinand II. of Leon died, bequeathing his crown to 
his son, Alfonso IX. Portugal was elevated, by a bull 
of Pope Alexander III., into a kingdom under Sancho 
1.(1179). 



A Superannuated Voluptuary, 197 

Abdelmoumen had left his vast heritage to his son, 
the Cid Yousof, a liberal, humane, and enlightened 
prince, to whom Spain owed the beautiful mosque of 
Seville (whose tower and path are still standing), who 
built magnificent quais and magazines, brought the pure 
mountain water into the city by an aqueduct still ex- 
tant, and spanned the Guadalquivir with a bridge. Pie 
was massacred while besieging Santarem in Portugal, in 
1 184, and was succeeded by Yacoub, one of his eigh- 
teen sons. In the mighty battle of Alarcos (between 
Cordova and Calatrava), fought in 1195, "God sent 
terror into the soul of Alfonso," says an Arabian chron- 
icle, and the Christians were utterly routed by Yacoub. 
A space of one hundred and twelve years separated 
this disaster from that of Zallaca, but, like most Mus- 
sulman victories, it was fruitless in consequence of the 
absurd incompetence of the commanding officers. Ex- 
actly one hundred years after the death of the Cid, Ya- 
coub expired, a superannuated voluptuary, in the midst 
of the delights of his Alcazar. Under him the Almo- 
hade empire attained its highest splendor, with Alarcos 
as its culminating point. But this was the last great 
success of the Crescent in Spain, and its humiliating 
memory was soon extinguished by the glorious triumph 
of Las Navas de Tolosa (12 12). 

Pedro II. ascended the throne of Aragon in 1196, 
on the death of his father, Alfonso II., one of the 
greatest and most accomplished of the Aragonese 
kings, a famous patron of the gate science, and a trouba- 
dour himself. The daughter of Sancho V., the Wise, 
of Navarre, married Richard the Lion-hearted, thus 
binding by one more link the kingdoms of Spain with 



108 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

the court of England. Sancho the Strong (VI.), fol- 
lowed his father on the throne of Navarre, and made 
himself despicable by his alliance with the emir of 
Morocco. Amicable relations were partially established 
between Alfonso of Castile and the king of Leon, by 
the marriage of the latter with Berenguela (1198). Al- 
fonso's daughter. Of this union was born, in 1199, 
Saint Ferdinand (III.), who conquered Seville and Cor- 
dova, though the near relationship of the two com- 
pelled their separation in 1204. Louis VIII. of France 
married Blanca, another of his daughters, and their 
son became Saint Louis of France. 

Pedro II. of Aragon, following the policy of Sancho 
I., who had engaged to pay the Holy See a tribute of 
five hundred gold pieces, went to Rome and placed his 
crown under the spiritual sovereignty of Pope Innocent 
III., — an event of dismal result for Aragon, against 
which the proud nobility of the land murmured loudly. 
It was in his day that Simon de Montfort undertook 
his famous expedition against the heretics of Langue- 
doc, during which the romantic and inconsistent Pedro, 
fighting against him, and hence against the Holy Falher, 
was slain, and deprived of sepulture for six months as 
an enemy of God and the church. During his reign 
the power of the ricos omes was much diminished, and the 
power of thejustiza increased. Sancho IV. of Navarre, 
died in 1234, and his narrow kingdom, shut in on all 
sides in the direction of Spain, inclined toward France, 
with whose history it is henceforth bound up. 

Mohammed, the son of Yacoub, had now become the 
Emir of Africa and Spain. The emir, — whose unpar- 
donable delay before Salvatierra, made the Arabian 



An Important Date. 199 

chronicler say, " that a swallow had time to build her 
nest under the roof of his tent, raise her young, and 
fly away with them before Salvatierra was taken " — ad- 
vanced against Alfonso with half a million of men. Cru- 
saders " swarmed to Toledo from France, Italy, Ger- 
many, and all parts of Europe, at the call of Innocent 
III.," to prevent Spain from being again subjugated. 
Many of the Mussulman soldiers were chained together 
to prevent their fleeing, but the battle, fought near Las 
Navas de Tolosa, turned in favor of the Spaniards, 
when sixty thousand of the Andalusian Arabs, who 
despised the Almohade Berbers, turned their backs and 
fled. From one hundred thousand to two hundred 
thousand Mussulmans are said to have fallen, and only 
fifty (!) Spaniards. 

The day of Las A T avas, after that of the Guadalete, is 
the most important date in Spanish history. The flood 
of invasion, from that clay became a receding one, and 
the Arabian empire, five hundred years old, began to 
disappear. Twice in two hundred years the inferior 
African race had conquered and lost the empire of the 
peninsula. Zallaca was avenged ! 

The iron chain which surrounded the tent of the emir 
passed into the coat of arms of Navarre, and thence to 
the arms of France. 

Mohammed died of poison in 12 13 and was followed 
by his son, Yousof. Alfonso VIII. expired of fever in 
12 14. He is said to have laid the foundation of the 
first university in Spain at Palencia, in 1209, confirmed 
and extended ihe/m'/vs of his states, and, by the happy 
alliances of his daughters, established his influence in 
Leon, Portugal, Aragon, and France. His kingdom 



200 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

fell to his son, Enrique I., under the guardianship of his 
mother, Eleanor of England. He died in 12 17, struck 
on the head by a falling tile, and his sagacious and ad- 
mirable sister Berenguela, laying aside her own rights, 
placed the crown on the head of her son Ferdinand III., 
called the " Saint " (12 17). He married Beatrice of Sua- 
bia, daughter of the Emperor Philip, who died in 1208, 
and it was through her that his famous son, Alfonso X., 
claimed the imperial throne of Germany. The most 
notable title to fame of his contemporary, Alfonso IX. 
of Leon, was his establishment in 1222 of the university 
of Salamanca. At his death, Leon was united with 
Castile under Ferdinand III. 

The history of the peninsula during the thirteenth 
century thus revolves around two significant facts — the 
battle of Las Navas de Tolosa and the union of Castile 
and Leon. 

Ferdinand had a worthy rival in the person of the 
heroic king of Aragon, Jayme I., called the Conqueror, 
son of Pedro I I. and Marie of Montpellier. The house 
of Champagne, in the person of Thibault, nephew of 
Sancho, now occupied the throne of Navarre, and from 
that day France exercised an ascendency over the des- 
tinies of the kingdom, till its union with Castile in the 
time of Ferdinand the Catholic. 

Between 12 13 and 1236, under the repeated and bril- 
liant successes of Jayme I. and Ferdinand III., the 
Almohade empire was humbled and weakened. Yousof 
was horned to death by a cow in 1224; Abd-el-Wahid, 
his grand-uncle, was proclaimed Emir of Morocco ; two 
of his nephews got possession of Valencia and Seville ; 
and Andalusia became separated from Africa. The 



Death of St. Ferdinand. 201 

Balearic Isles, conquered in 1 115 by the counts of Bar- 
celona, had been lost by the perfidy of the Genoese ; 
but they were reconquered by the valiant Jayme of 
Aragon in 1229, who, with infinite naivete, tells the whole 
story in his memoirs. In 1236 Cordova fell into the 
hands of Ferdinand, and he immediately raised the vic- 
torious cross over the noble mosque, the noblest ever 
devoted to the worship of Islam, where he found the 
bells of Santiago which had been carried off by Alman- 
sor from Compostella. The capture of Cordova is 
memorable from the fact that from this time Andalusia 
passed inch by inch under the yoke of Castile. 

It has been well said that if the church had not called 
Ferdinand Samf, history would have called him Great. 
The keys of Seville, the finest of his conquests, were 
delivered up to him by its brave defender, Abou Hassan, 
in 1246. He won back one part of Andalusia after 
another till, consumed by a dropsical complaint, he 
expired in 1252, and was buried in Seville. The union 
of Castile and Leon gave Spain a great impetus 
towards a consolidation of all the states. Ferdinand 
made the most disinterested use of his power, and to 
him is due the great thought of endowing Castile and 
Leon with unity of legislation, though it was left to his 
son, Alfonso X., to achieve it. 

Valencia had fallen in 1248, so that the Saracen em- 
pire in the south became more and more compressed 
within a narrow strip of sea-coast and mountain-land. 
Granada was the last refuge of these vanquished prov- 
inces, and here for more than two hundred years yet a 
series of able and accomplished princes kept alive the 
dying embers of Islam. 



202 To Ferdinand and Isabella, 

Jayme I. of Aragon's remarkable reign closed in 
1276. A great warrior, poet, and politician; a gen- 
eral who gained thirty pitched battles over the Moors 
and founded more than two thousand churches ; the 
most accomplished chevalier of his times ; a broad- 
shouldered, blue-eyed, golden-haired, smiling, heroic 
personality ; he committed as usual the odious blunder 
of dividing up his kingdoms among his three sons, and 
was instrumental in introducing the inquisition into Ara- 
gon (1232) : two grave missteps to some extent counter- 
balanced by his enlightened love of the arts, his efforts 
to simplify the confused jurisprudence of the country, 
and his indefatigable pursuit of the Moors. The mar- 
riage of his son Pedro with Costanza, daughter of Man- 
fred, king of Sicily and bastard of Frederic II., empe- 
ror of Germany (concluded in 1262), was the source of 
the rights of Aragon over Sicily, in after years so fruit- 
ful of important results. Other alliances — with Al- 
fonso X. of Castile and Philip III. of France — con- 
nected Aragon with the principal thrones of Europe. 
A negotiation took place between him and Saint Louis 
of France by which the latter renounced his ancient 
rights of suzerainty over Catalonia, Roussillon and 
Cerdagne, and the former gave up his feoffs in the 
south of France, with the exception of Montpellier. 

Thibault I. of Navarre had died in 1253, leaving two 
sons, Thibault II. and Enrique. Thibault II. left the 
succession to his brother Enrique, and received the 
generous friendship of Jayme of Aragon. — 

" King Ferdinand alone did stand one day upon the hill, 
Surveying all his leaguers, and the ramparts of Seville ; 
The sight was grand, when Ferdinand by proud Seville was lying, 
O'er tower and tree far off to see the Christian banners flying. 




DESPOILERS OF THE AZULEJ05 OF THE ALI1AMBRA. 



G-arci Perez the Valorous. 205 



"That day the Lord of Vargas came to the camp alone ; 
The scarf, his lady's largess, around his heart was thrown ; 
Bare was his head, his sword was red, and, from his pommel strung, 
Seven turbans green, sore hacked I ween, before Don Garci hung." 

" Above all others there signalized himself in these 
affairs (the conquest of Seville) that Garci Perez de 
Vargas, a native of Toledo, of whose valor so many 
marvellous and almost incredible achievements are re- 
lated. One day, about the beginning of the siege, this 
Garci and another with him were riding by the side of 
the river at some distance from the outposts, when of a 
sudden there came upon them a party of seven Moors 
on horseback. The companion of Perez was for re- 
turning immediately, but he replied that " Never, even 
though he should lose his life for it, would he consent 
to the baseness of flight." With that his companion 
riding off, Perez armed himself, closed his vizor, and 
put his lance in rest. But the enemies, when they 
knew who it was, declined the combat. He had there- 
fore pursued his way by himself for some space, when 
he perceived that in lacing the head-piece and shutting 
the vizor, he had, by inadvertence, dropped his scarf. 
He immediately returned upon his steps, that he might 
seek for it. The king, as it happened, had his eyes 
upon Perez all this time; for the royal tent looked 
towards the place where he was riding ; and he never 
doubted that the knight had turned back for the purpose 
of provoking the Moors to the combat. But they 
avoided him as before, and he, having regained his scarf, 
came in safety to the camp." — Such is one of the innum- 
erable incidents recounted by Mariana of Ferdinand's 



206 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

expedition in the south — such incidents as the high- 
souled ballad writers and their Scotch interpreter de- 
lighted in. Whether true or false, their spirit is charac- 
teristic, and they show the knightly coloring of these 
romantic contests. 

The next reign is the most important that we have 
hitherto reached, and of singular interest to Spanish 
literature and legislation — that of Alfonso X., the 
Learned. 

This prince reigned from 1252 to 1284, a period of 
thirty-two years, filled with strange vicissitudes and 
misfortunes. He was the most learned prince of his 
time ; a troubadour, a geometrician, an astronomer, 
"he was more fit for letters, than for the government 
" of his subjects ; he studied the heavens, and watched 
the stars, but forgot the earth, and lost his kingdom," 
says Mariana, (in Ticknor). A man of extensive politi- 
cal, philosophic, and linguistic attainments ; at one 
period of his life elected Emperor of Germany, but set 
aside by Rudolph of Habsburg, (1273); the creator of 
Castilian prose, the compiler of the famous Alfonsine 
astronomical tables, and the author in part of a great 
work on legislation which even now is an authority in 
both hemispheres ; a composer of hundreds of canticles 
in the Galician dialect; a seeker after the philosopher's 
stone ; his chief claim to recognition is literary and 
legislative. He first made the Castilian a national 
language by causing the Bible to be translated into it, 
and requiring it to be used in all legal proceedings ; 
and by his great code, his chronicle, his compilations 
on the Holy Land, the probable translation under him 
of the Fuero Juzgo or foncm judicum, (a collection of 



Alfonso the Learned. 207 

Visigotbic laws, which, in 1241, Saint Ferdinand sent 
to Cordova as the law to be observed in the newly con- 
quered territory), he showed the extraordinary far- 
sightedness and breadth of his intellect. Ferdinand 
III. did not live to see his project of one code for all 
Christian Spain under his sceptre realized. Alfonso 
attempted to cany out his father's beneficent plan ; put 
forth a body of laws called the " Mirror of all Rights," 
which did not apparently go into practical effect ; then 
his shorter code for Valladolid, called Fuero Real, 
(1255); and finally his noble work, Las Siete Partidas 
(The Seven Parts, from its divisions), called originally 
by Alfonso, himself, El Setenario, from the title of the 
code undertaken by his father. This was a compilation 
or encyclopaedia of legislative usage, drawn by Alfonso 
and his collaborators, from the Decretals, the Digest and 
Code of Justinian, the Fuero Juzgo, and other foreign 
and domestic sources, so skilfully executed in style, 
that Alfonso's literary taste is readily traceable through- 
out it. It forms the body of the Spanish common law,* 
the basis of all Spanish jurisprudence in Europe and 
America since its adoption, in 1348, as of binding 
authority in all the territories held by the kings of 
Castile and Leon, and its spirit is that of a reaction 
against the nobility, of a consolidation of the monarchi- 
cal principle, and of plenary recognition of the Church. 
A sort of Spanish James I., as he has been called, — 
passionate, vain, learned, a singular mixture of puerility 
and strength, — Alfonso X., instead of expelling the 
Moors, and accomplishing the great work begun by his 
father, treated with them, and threw himself into the 
arms of Yousof, Emir of Morocco ; permitted the 
* See Ticknor, Vol. I., pp. 37-59- 



208 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

princes and nobles to combat him and their own coun- 
try ; gave free range to the civil conflicts which, at the 
end of the thirteenth century, began all over Europe to 
take the place of the Crusades ; and, after recounting 
in his will the wrongs and black ingratitude he had 
suffered from his son, Sancho, he left him the kingdom, 
though it should have descended to his grandson, son 
of the heir apparent, Don Ferdinand. The stain of 
blood likewise clings to his memory, for he caused his 
own brother to be strangled in 1277, because he had 
favored the flight of the Queen Violante to Aragon, 
with her two grandsons, the famous and unfortunate 
infants of La Cerda. They were the sons of Don 
Ferdinand, who died in 1275. 

Ben Alahmar, emir of Granada, virtually founded the 
kingdom of Granada during this reign — a compact, 
populous, and warlike sovereignty which recognized 
the suzerainty of Castile, and was a great school of 
arts, sciences, and intellectual culture, for the whole 
country. The present Alhambra began to rise under 
Alahmar's care, and the ancient splendor of the khali- 
fate revived for a time in his diminutive realm. 



CHAPTER X. 

FROM THE ALMORAVIDE CONQUEST TO FERDI- 
NAND AND ISABELLA. 
[continued.] 

WHILE Castile was sinking into the abyss of 
civil war, Aragon, under the able reign of Pedro 
the Great, (III.,) from 1276 to 1285, was developing 
extensively within and without. This prince repulsed 
successfully the French invasion under Philip, planted 
the banner of Aragon in Sicily, mingled the narrow 
current of Spanish politics with the vast stream of 
European diplomacy, entered the lists with the papacy, 
and showed for the first time, with his contemporary, 
Alfonso X., that statesmen had taken the place of 
saints and heroes on the thrones of Castile and Aragon. 
The Sicilians, after the sanguinary episode of the Sici- 
lian Vespers, in 1282, expelled the house of Anjou 
from the land, and offered the crown to the king of 
Aragon, " au nom de Dieu et de Madame Sainte 
Marie." The nobles and burghers of Aragon having 
united themselves in a solemn Union for the defence of 
their fueros against the royal encroachments, Don Pedro 
gave them satisfaction in an act (1283) known as the 
Privilegio Gefieral, the magna charta of Aragon, " a 
basis of civil liberty,''* says Hallam, "perhaps even 
more satisfactory than ours," granted to " rebels on 

209 



210 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

their knees." The act exhibits a striking harmony 
between the character and institutions of the English 
and the Aragonese ; the love of freedom, of law, of 
independence of the individual, of private and political 
rights, and the restoration of ancient franchises, rather 
than the conquest of new. 

Pedro bequeathed Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, 
to his eldest son, Alfonso, with the suzerainty of 
Majorca, Cerdagne, and Roussillon, and to Don Jayme, 
his second son, the kingdom of Sicily, and the Italian 
conquests. 

From 1284 to 1295 Sancho IV. exercised vigorous 
sway over Castile ; " immediately," says the chronicle, 
" all the wars ceased as if by enchantment, as soon as 
men knew Sancho was king ! " He drove the emir 
of Morocco, in 1291, back into Africa, and closed his 
too brief life in 1295, leaving his kingdom to his son, 
the minor, Ferdinand IV., (called The Put-off?) with his 
mother, Dona Maria, as guardian. Sancho recon- 
structed the power which Alfonso X. had let drop to 
pieces, and effaced by the vigor of his government, the 
crime of having killed his father of grief. Ferdinand 
died, affected by a sort of superstitious terror, in 13 12. 
It seems that the king had caused two gentlemen, 
accused of murder, to be put to death without judicial 
inquiry. They protested their innocence, and sum- 
moned the king to appear in thirty days, before the 
tribunal of God. Ferdinand's health, already under- 
mined, rapidly gave way, and he expired at the very 
hour when the thirty days ran out. 

During his reign was begun in Aragon and Castile the 
well known process against the Templars, — initiated in 




THE VASE OF THE alHAMBRA. 



The Rieos Omes. 21 3 

France by Philip the Fair, — whose order was dissolved in 
13 1 2, after a duration of one hundred and eighty-four 
years. In Aragon, Castile, and Portugal, however, 
owing to the eternal crusade against the Moors, it was 
allowed to exist. The imputed crime seems to have been 
enormous wealth, idolatry, and the envy, mingled with 
dread, which a vast and opulent organization inspired. 

The most salient result of the reign of Alfonso III. 
of Aragon (1 285-1 291) was the immense increase of 
the power of the ricos omes, or great vassals, and of the 
communities at the expense of the royal prerogative. 
Alfonso's single claim to immortality rests perhaps in 
three lines of Dante. 

" E se re dopo lui fosse rimaso 

Lo giovinetto, che retro a lui siede, 

Bene andava il valor di vaso in vaso." (St. Hilaire.) 

The surname of the Magnificent applied to him will 
give an idea of the main feature of his character. Jayme 
the Justice, second of the name and brother of Alfonso, 
succeeded him, and ruled till 1327 — a reign filled with 
success abroad and peace at home. " It is as hard to 
separate the Aragonese as it is to unite the Castilians," 
said Ferdinand the Catholic of these very distinct prov- 
inces. Jayme's Aragonese people aided him patriotically 
in his enterprises ; he was invested with the sovereignty 
of Corsica and Sardinia by the pope ; Sicily was aban- 
doned ; the high nobility were continually struggled 
against ; the franchises of the people protected ; the 
Justice, that characteristic institution of Aragon, carefully 
guarded in his rights and procedure, and a universal 
respect for law inculcated. 

On the death of Jeanne, Queen of France and Na- 



214 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

varre, in 1307, her son, Louis-le-Hutin became king of 
Navarre and swore to maintain the fueros of the coun- 
try. Two years before, Clement V. had abandoned 
Rome and established himself at Avignon, thus put- 
ting the pontificate into the hands of Philip the Fair. 
The coronation-feast of Jeanne of Navarre, daughter of 
Louis-le-Hutin, and her husband, the Comte d'Evreux, in 
1329, was enlivened by the episode of the massacre of 
ten thousand Jews in the city of Estella. 

The series of great princes that succeeded one another 
in Aragon continued through Jayme II. and Alfonso 
IV. the Benign, to Pedro IV., son of the last. The 
noble figure of Pedro IV. already, in his father's life- 
time, overshadowed his parent's. The furious wars 
between Aragon and Genoa — the great commercial 
competitors of the Mediterranean — assumed a charac- 
ter of ferocity under Alfonso, which recalls the struggle 
between Rome and Carthage, on a sea where the blood- 
thirsty rivals, in their passion for commerce, were 
doomed to meet at every point. 

" Castile has just lost cr.e of its noblest kings," cried 
the Emir of Granada at the death of Alfonso XL in 1350, 
and the Emir and his chieftains wore mourning for the 
deceased king and let his body pass undisturbed. He 
died of the Black Death, near Gibraltar, — a pestilence 
then devastating Europe. 

The cortes of Alcala in 1348, is celebrated for the 
proclamation of the Partidas as national laws, " in as 
far as they were not contrary to the laws of the king- 
dom, to God, and to reason." 

The germs of ultramontanism and monarchical abso- 
lutism contained in Alfonso X.'s code, bore abundant 



Alfonso XL 215 

fruit in the following reigns. About 1330, Alfonso XI. 
began the liaison with Leonora cle Guzman, who be- 
came the mother of Don Enrique of Trastamara, slayer 
of his brother, Don Pedro, king of Castile. Her beauty 
and charms had fascinated the inconstant monarch. 
Inflexibly just, Alfonso did all he could to reduce the 
brawling grandees to obedience ; he razed their castles, 
summoned them to lay down their arms and resort to 
legal means to terminate their feuds ; and utilized their 
newly harmonized strength in the great battle of Rio 
Sa/ado, against the Moors, in 1340. Here infidels fell 
in miraculous abundance — two hundred thousand out 
of five hundred thousand ; and Christians in miraculous 
paucity— twenty Castilians ! And from this day for- 
ward, Africa was pushed back forever beyond the strait ; 
the emirate of Granada, abandoned to itself, sank more 
and more in the face of the Christian monarchies per- 
petually on the alert to seek out its ruin ; and the way 
was opened for the Catholic kings to fulfil their vows 
of putting the misbelievers from the land. The battle 
was fought near Algeziras, opposite Gibraltar, against 
the almost countless hosts of the two allied Emirs of 
Morocco and Granada.. 

This is the last of the Alfonsos of Castile, until the 
coronation of Alfonso XII. in our days. 

Don Pedro of Castile, first of the name, left behind, 
in his sobriquet of Cruel, the memory of a Tiberius. 
His cruelty was constitutional ; he had an instinctive 
thirst for blood ; he was an unmanageable voluptuary ; 
and he murdered right and left within the limits of his 
own family until he had nearly extirpated it. He died, 
stabbed to the heart in a fierce struggle with his half- 



216 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

brother Don Enrique, in 1369, leaving enormous wealth 
in diamonds, gold and silver, and precious stuffs, and 
became ever memorable for his illegitimate union with 
Dona Maria de Padilla, a noble Spanish lady ; for the 
murder of his unfortunate wife, Blanche of France, of the 
lineage of the fleur de lys ; for his implacable rigor 
towards the nobles ; and his base covetousness, perfidy, 
and vulgarity. A Jew, Samuel Levi, as usual with the 
Castilian kings, was his treasurer, and Pedro's base 
treachery to him is historical. He was contemporary with . 
that Don Pedro of Portugal whose amours with Inez de 
Castro have gained such tragic celebrity. The pope 
launched the interdict against him " as an adulterer and 
bigamist, the enemy of God and the church." His 
rupture with Aragon in 1356 brought the Castilian flag 
under the walls of one of the Aragonese capitals and 
cost the king of Aragon his crown and life. He slew 
the grandmaster of Santiago (his half-brother) • the Ad- 
elantado of Castile (Garcilaso de la Vega) ; the mother 
of his half-brothers ; the Infant Don Juan of Aragon ; 
his own aunt Dona Leonora of Aragon ; Don Juan and 
Don Pedro (his half brothers) ; and a long list of other 
relations and friends. The death of Dona Maria de 
Padilla — pure-hearted, good, and charitable as she 
was — filled him with a frenzy of love and despair. 
The emir of Granada with fifty of his noblest sheikhs, 
who had sought the hospitality of Pedro, had their 
throats cut in Seville by his order (1362). In his bitter 
war against Aragon and France, he allied himself with 
Edward III. of England and the Black Prince, with 
Navarre and Granada, whilst Pedro of Aragon recog- 
nized Don Enrique of Castile as sole king of that land, 



A Barefooted King. 217 

and strengthened himself by the project of a double 
marriage between the houses of France and Aragon. 
Pedro's superstition was at least equal to his ferocity 
and impurity; for, escaping from imminent danger in 
1365, he ran to church barefooted, in his shirt, with a 
rope round his neck, to thank "Madame Sainte Marie" 
for saving his life. Unfortunately for him, France was 
then scourged by the host of Breton adventurers called 
the Great Companies ; men habituated to live on plunder, 
reduced to inactivity by the peace just concluded with 
England, and threatening universal disorder to the realm 
of Charles V. Headed by the illustrious chief Ber-' 
trand Du Guesclin, they were engaged by Don Enrique 
and the king of Aragon to drive out Pedro the Cruel 
(who had just been excommunicated by Urban), and 
avenge the death of Blanche. They arrived thirty 
thousand in number, ■ — ■ Gascons, English, and Bretons, 
— in Barcelona, in 1365. Pedro fled the kingdom, 
after murdering the archbishop of Santiago to procure 
means for a new campaign for the restoration of his 
rights, and was received with chivalric courtesy by the 
Black prince " in the name of God and St. George." 
The Black Prince put at Pedro's service the forces of 
England and of half of France. Froissart, in his in- 
imitable narrative, tells the story of the contest ; and 
the war-cries " Guyenne and St. George ! " " Castile and 
Santiago ! " echo lustily through his pages. Pedro and 
the English were at first victorious ; but the fruit, the 
heat, the air & Espaigne, ruined the health of the Eng- 
lish auxiliaries and caused them to withdraw. Pedro, 
after a brief restoration to power, was shut up in the 
chateau of Montiel so closely that " a bird could not 



218 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

have left the castle without being seen." Du Guesclin 
besieged him, and treacherously delivered him over to 
Don Enrique. In the savage struggle that ensued be- 
tween the brothers, the poniard of Don Enrique put an 
end to the life of the miserable barbarian. Cries of 
''Castile and Enrique II.," now floated exultingly on 
the air, while the execrated corpse of the master lav 
for three days on the earth exposed to the maledictions 
of the Spaniards. 

" Much grieved the bowman for her tears, and for her beauty's sake, 
While thus Queen Blanche of Bourbon her last complaint did make: 
O France my noble country ! O blood of high Bourbon ! 
Not eighteen years have I seen out before my life is gone. 
The king hath never known me. A virgin true I die. 
"Whate'er I've done, to proud Castile no treason e'er did I." 

" The Queen Blanche had been banished to the castle 
of Medina-Sidonia, — the adjoining territory being as- 
signed to her for her maintenance. One of her vassals, 
a Jew, presumed to do his homage in the usual fashion, 
that is, by kissing Blanche on the cheek, ere his true 
character was suspected either by her or her attendants. 
No sooner was the man known to be a Jew, than he 
was driven from the presence of the queen with every 
mark of insult ; and this sunk so deeply into his mind, 
that he determined to revenge himself, if possible, by 
the death of Blanche. He told his story to Maria de 
Padilla, who prevailed on the king to suffer him to take 
his own measures j and he accordingly surprised the 
castle by night, at the head of a troop of his country- 
men, and butchered the unhappy lady." Such is the 
legend of the death of Queen Blanche, as told in the old 
French memoirs of Du Guesclin, quoted by Lockhart. 



Death of Don Pedro. 221 

The story of Don Pedro's death is told in Froissart : 
" In the course of an hour Enrique was apprised that 
he was taken, and came with some of his followers to 
the tent of Allan de la Houssaye, where his unfortunate 
brother had been placed. On entering it he exclaimed, 
' Where is that whoreson and Jew who calls himself 
king of Castile ? ' Pedro, as proud and fearless as he 
was cruel, stepped instantly forward, and replied, 
' Here I stand, the lawful son and heir of Don Alfonso, 
and it is thou that art but a false bastard.' The rival 
brethren instantly grappled like lions, the French 
knights and Du Guesclin himself looking on. Enrique 
drew his poniard, and wounded Pedro in the face, but 
his body was defended by a coat of mail. A violent 
struggle ensued. Enrique fell across a bench, and his 
brother, being uppermost, had well nigh mastered him, 
when one of Enrique's followers, seizing Don Pedro by 
the leg, turned him over, and his master, thus at length 
gaining the upper hand, instantly stabbed the king to 
the heart. 

"Pedro's head" says Lockhart, "was cut off, and 
his remains meanly buried. They were afterwards dis- 
interred by his daughter, the wife of our own John of 
Gaunt, ' time-honored Lancaster,' and deposited in Se- 
ville, with the honors due to his rank." 

"Thus with mortal gasp and quiver, while the blood in bubbles 

welled, 
Fled the fiercest soul that ever in a Christian bosom dwelled." 

Scott. 

A glance at some of the peculiar institutions of feudal 
Spain is necessary to understand the further history of 
the country. 



222 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

The feudal system arrived at its complete develop- 
ment in the fourteenth century, but in Castile it was 
variously modified by the character of the people. The 
slave was gradually replaced in the middle ages by the 
serf, an immense step towards freedom. Up to the 
eleventh century the mass of the servile population, so 
enormous under the Gothic supremacy, does not seem 
to have, diminished. The permanent war against the 
Arabs, while recruiting the servile population, must 
however have contributed to the emancipation of the 
Christian slaves, who became more and more rare as 
the feudal organization develops. Yet the slave trade 
continued vigorously till the fourteenth century • Chris- 
tians sold one another, and Jew slaves existed down to 
the times of Philip II. Captivity in war, birth, and 
voluntary servitude were the three great sources of 
slavery recognized by Alfonso X ; and countless minute 
regulations existed as to the relations between masters 
and slaves, manumission, and the like, which show a 
steady advance over the thing, as the slave was regarded, 
of the Gothic code. The Spanish serf, superior to his 
European brethren, could change his lord at will, and 
quit the glebe which he cultivated. The source of serf- 
age in the peninsula lay in the Roman system of Co/oni, 
a class intermediate between the slave and free man, 
and the Gothic system of client and patron, which im- 
posed the obligation to bear arms in defence of the 
patron. The class of serfs increased out of the debris 
of slavery, the emancipated Christian slaves, Saracen 
captives, tributary Mussulmans, and petty proprietors 
who voluntarily became "liege men." This lower order 
of the feudal hierarchy constituted the foundation for 



Oastilian Feudalism. 223 

the higher members of the system : the high barons, 
direct vassals of the sovereign, and the vassals of these, 
who yielded military service to their suzerain in ex- 
change for their feoffs. Early Spanish history shows 
us, on one side, the spectacle of the kings, communes, 
and clergy in league, supporting themselves upon the 
Gothic code and the municipal fueros which proceeded 
from the king ; and, on the other, the nobility, surrounded 
by its numerous vassals, opposing to the written monar- 
chical or municipal law its seignorial fueros, as seen in 
the Fuero Viejo wrung from Alfonso X. 

The salient feature of Castilian feudalism is that the 
vassalage it entailed was but temporary, and not fixed, 
and the free will of the vassal was his inalienable pos- 
session. It will be impossible to enter into the details, 
as shown by the Fuero Viejo and the Fartidas, of the 
nature of the feoff, and the laws that regulate it ; the 
relations between the suzerain and his vassals ; the dif- 
ferent forms of feudal property ; the different classes 
of serfs attached to it ■ the burdens resting on these 
serfs ; and the gradual growth and establishment of 
heredity in the holding of the feoffs. We shall simply 
call attention to the prominence of individual will 
throughout the system, resulting in the factious inde- 
pendence of the nobles, and the progress of the com- 
munities in power and freedom, peopled as they were 
largely from the serf class escaped from the nobiliary 
glebe. The emancipation of the territory from the 
Moors went hand in hand with the progress of the vas- 
sals of the crown, and the vassals of the nobles 
towards independence and comfort. Political fran- 
chises followed local franchises ; representative gov- 



224 



To Ferdinand and Isabella. 



ernment sprang up out of the embarrassments of the 
royal authority ; and the emancipated communities soon 
began a struggle of two centuries with the nobility, 
only to end in fatal disaster in the reigns of Charles 
and Philip. 

Pedro IV. of Aragon, the Ceremonious, in his reign of 




DON PEDRO THE CEREMONIOUS. 

more than half a century (1336-1387), was constantly 
harassed by foreign and domestic wars. Pursued from 
infancy by the hatred of his step-mother, Leonor, sister 
of Alfonso XI. of Castile, and queen dowager of Ara- 
gon ; passing his life in everlasting struggle, and van- 
quishing in the end by means of a duplicity as patient 



Castile and Aragon. 225 

as it was untiring; shedding the blood of his own 
brother, and employing the sword or prison against 
those whom he hated ; his icy rigor was in chilling con- 
trast with the ferocious passionateness and ability of 
his contemporary, Pedro of Castile, Vengeance for 
him was a means, never an end ; he could both punish 
and pardon when necessary ; he liked to surround him- 
self, like Louis XI. and J'hilip the Fair, with men of 
the law, and admitted them into his councils ; and in 
peace and war he was always followed by two legists 
and two gentlemen as representatives of the two rival 
orders of Aragon, equally at dagger's point with the 
high nobility. A frail and sickly body enshrined this 
punctilious and inflexible soul ; Pedro was a devotee of 
alchemy and astronomy ; his morality was a worship of 
conventionalities, and yet he may be called the greatest 
of the kings of Aragon before Ferdinand the Catholic. 
In 1344 he dispossessed Jayme II., and incorporated 
the kingdom of Majorca with Aragon. A great prince 
and politician after the model of Machiavelli, he drank 
gracefully the chalice of humiliation put to his lips by 
the rebellious nobles of the Union, who extorted from 
him a confirmation of their privileges, so dear to the 
Aragonese. But he had his revenge on the battle-field 
of Epila in 1348, when the party of the Union — em- 
bracing the capital and chief cities of Aragon, headed 
by the Infant Don Ferdinand — was utterly routed, the 
ancient privilege allowing the Aragonese to unite for 
the defence of their laws, abolished, and the fatal as- 
cendency of the aristocracy broken. Pedro, however, 
strengthened the authority of the justice and avenged 
himself nobly by extending rather than curtailing the 



226 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

privileges and franchises of his people at the great 
cortes of Saragossa. He prudently took little part in 
the great Schis??i of the West (1378-1417) which gave to 
the church two rival popes, Urban VI. at Rome, and 
Clement VII. at Avignon, and renounced the crown of 
Sicily in favor of Don Martin, his son. 

" Law first, kings afterwards," is the proud device of 
Aragon, and in casting a retrospective glance on the 
origin of its special institutions we are struck with this 
ever-present love and preponderance of legality over 
force. A kingdom dating from the eleventh century, 
Aragon differs from Castile in extorting its franchises 
one by one from its rulers, rather than in holding them 
by the investiture of its rulers. While Castile is a 
truer representative of the Spanish genius, Aragon is 
its noblest product. The Frankish or Germanic ele- 
ment in its manners and legislation contributed no little 
to that passion for freedom which is the most marked 
feature of Aragon. Its ricos omes, or great vassals, 
planted themselves on their Privilegio General; their 
feoffs became hereditary from the twelfth century ; they 
transmitted them as in Castile without observing the 
law of primogeniture ; and their caste interest made 
them watch vigilantly over the liberties of the country. 
The various orders of inferior nobility — the mesuadero, 
his sons the i?ifa?izones, who corresponded to the Cas- 
tilian hidalgo, and the caballeros, — all had their special 
rights and immunities, more or less colored by the same 
freedom-loving spirit. While in Castile the clergy was 
nearly all-powerful, from the times of the Goths to Al- 
fonso X., it is only in 1301 that they obtained a seat in 
the Cortes of Aragon, as the last come and least influen- 



The Justices of Aragon. 229 

tial of the orders of the state. The communa) fueros of 
the country originated, as in Castile, from the necessity of 
peopling a newly acquired territory by liberal immuni- 
ties, like that of Saragossa wrested from the infidels in 
1118 by Alfonso I. Aristocratic is the word which best 
describes the institutions of Aragon, monarchical, those 
of Castile, and democratic those of Catalonia. In Ara- 
gon, distrust of the royal power is as old as the royal 
power itself ; the king was " the first among equals," 
and up to the thirteenth century he was not crowned. 
The famous formula attributed to the ricos omes of Ara- 
gon, shows the spirit of equality rife. "We, each of 
whom is as good as you and who all together are more 
powerful, make you our king, as long as you shall keep 
our fueros ; otherwise, not." So that it was truly said 
that monarchy in Aragon was in an attitude of perma- 
nent suspicion in the eyes of the country. 

The position of the justice of Aragon, at first a mere 
mouthpiece of the decisions of king, bishops, and ricos 
omes, becomes independent on the abolition of the priv- 
ileges of the Union by Pedro IV. in 1348 ; his office was 
life-long ; he was chosen from among the gentry, and his 
power was so great that e'en Philip II. was compelled 
to plead before him. He was the tutelary genius and 
guardian of the liberties of the country. His business 
was to remain at court within the limits of Aragon, to 
examine cases and hear pleas in the king's absence, 
and pronounce without personal responsibility the deci- 
sions reached by the assembled grandees, clergy, and 
sovereign. His authority continually increased at the 
expense of the royal prerogative, and he became, finally, 
the supreme legal protector of the oppressed against all 



230 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

injustice. A secret commission of inquisitors, as they 
were called, watched over his decisions. The bloody 
death of the forty-ninth and last of the Justices, in 
1598, under Philip II., drew with it the ruin and efface- 
ment of all the liberties of the people, and left a free 
career for the Austrian and Bourbon despotisms en- 
suing. 

Between the commercial Catalonians and the agricul- 
tural Aragonese there were many differences. Family 
names, language, literature, dignities, manners, laws, 
and coins, connect Catalonia intimately with the south 
of France. For a century and a half the counts of 
Barcelona were, as has been said, a cheval on the Pyre- 
nees, and belonged as much to France as to Spain. 
The Frankish domination is faithfully reflected in the 
Catalonian Usages, the basis of the Catalonian civil 
constitution and one of the oldest of the customary 
codes of Spain (1068). Catalonia was emancipated in 
the tenth century from the yoke of the Carolingian 
kings; its union with Aragon doubled its power; so 
that finally the troubadours of Provence sang the ex- 
ploits of the emperors of Barcelona. Mercantile con- 
quest — furious competition with Genoa and Venice — 
is the watchword of Catalonia ; the magnificos of Barce- 
lona could sit down with their hats on before the king ; 
a democratic spirit pervaded the whole municipal con- 
stitution of the province, and they guarded their liber- 
ties without a Justice. Their maritime code was 
famous; the vast naval expeditions of Pedro III. and 
his successors, against Sicily and Sardinia, gave their 
marine an immense impulse. In its Book of Gold were 
inscribed the names of the merchant aristocracy of Bar- 



Battle of Aljubarota, 231 

celona. Aragon is Spanish in idiom, in tenacity of 
purpose, and in narrow and exclusive patriotism. Cata- 
lonia is French in dialect and habitudes, and is French, 
Italian, or Spanish, according to the interests and alli- 
ances of the moment. 

The decade of the reign of Enrique IT., the Cavalier, 
ended in 1379 with his sudden death, attributed to poi- 
son emanating from a pair of boots sent to him by the 
Emir of Granada. Though a usurper, Enrique was 
worthy of the throne which he had gained by the life of 
his brother, and opposed successfully the duke of Lan- 
caster and the king of Portugal, who pretended to the 
crown of Castile, the former through his wife, daughter 
of Pedro the Cruel. In 1390, Don Juan I., Enrique's 
son, perished in an accident, his horse having fallen on 
him. He had claimed the succession and arms of his 
father-in-law, the king of Portugal, whose daughter Bea- 
trix he had married. A bloody contest ensued with the 
bastard Joa I., whom the Portuguese had proclaimed 
king. The celebrated battle of Aljubarota, described 
with such animation and picturesqueness by Froissart, 
was fought in 1385, "au nom de Dieu et de Monseign- 
eur Saint Jacques, " and lost by the Castilians. The 
disastrous English invasion ensued ; Santiago fell, and 
the duke of Lancaster assumed the title of king, with the 
arms of Castile, Leon, and France. The death of Chailes 
the Bad, of Navarre, in 1386 rid Spain of an indefati- 
gable discord-breeder ; and the withdrawal of the Eng- 
lish, devoured by ill-health and failure, left Galicia once 
more free. From 1388, the heir-apparent of Castile as- 
sumed the title of prince of the Asturias. 

The cortes of Guadalajara, held in 1390, left its mark 



232 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

on the legislation of the country by extensive increase 
of rights and privileges. 

•Enrique III., the Infirm, a boy of eleven, succeeded 
his father, but was soon bewailed for his early death 
and great though undeveloped qualities (1406). His 
chief enemies were his own subjects, headed by the 
Archbishop of Toledo, the duke of Beneventum, and 
the count of Trastamara, who leagued together to get 
the young king into their power. The Emirs of Gran- 
ada had meanwhile cautiously cultivated the good will 
of Castile, and endeavored to live at peace with the 
Christians. Frontier wars, however, broke out intermit- 
tently and never absolutely ceased till the conquest of 
Granada. 

Juan the Careless of Aragon (1387-1395), first of the 
name, an indolent voluptuary, lived unworthy of his 
great father Pedro the Ceremonious, and, like his Cas- 
tilian contemporary and namesake, was killed by a fall 
from his horse. 

Relaxation of morals and a dissipated court resulted 
from his ignoble sway, varied by the king's passion for 
hunting, music, and poetry. His court was the gayest 
and most splendid in Christendom. Don Martin, his 
brother, disembarked in Barcelona in 1396, and suc- 
ceeded, in default of male heirs to the king, to the 
throne. He had been absent in Sicily, engaged in con- 
quering a kingdom for his son. The kingdom of Ara- 
gon, whose cradle had been an obscure corner of the 
Pyrenees, had come gradually to spread itself over 
the three great islands of Italy, — Corsica, Sardinia, 
and Sicily, — and cover the Mediterranean and its 
shores with its fleets and banking-houses. Under Mar- 




BINDING UP THE PALM-LEAVES. 



Alvaro de Luna. 



235 



tin — whose heir, the infant king of Sicily, and duke 
of Athens and Neopatria, was carried off by the pestif- 
erous air of Sardinia — the Italian wars went on unend- 
ingly with the House of Anjou. Martin died without 
male. heirs in 1410, tormented by an unmanageable 
obesity, and with him expired the direct race of the 
counts of Barcelona who for three hundred vears had 




ALVARO DE LUNA. 

given to Aragon a series of kings such as are rarely 
seen in history. An interregnum of two years ensued, 
which rang with the conflicts of the five contestants for 
the throne. Chief among these were the Infant of 
Castile, Don Ferdinand, and the count of Urgel, great- 
grandson of Jayme II. Don Ferdinand was brother of 
P^nrique III. and nephew of Martin, as son of his sister 
Leonor, who had married King Juan of Castile. The 
case was at length decided by arbitration in favor of 



236 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

Ferdinand (141 2), the matter having been put into the 
hands of nine arbiters, three from Aragon ? three from 
Catalonia, and three from Valencia. 

The reign of Ferdinand L, the Just, lasted but two 
) r ears, and he left the repute of a simple-hearted, high- 
minded, and irreproachable king behind him. He with- 
drew his support from Benedict XIII., who had taken 
up his residence in a fort in Aragon, and appealed to 
the decrees of the council of Constance, then sitting 
'"at the centre of Christendom," with the aim of restor- 
ing unity and peace to the dismembered church. Flis 
early death prevented the accomplishment of his great 
projects. 

Juan II. of Castile died in 1454, regretting "not 
having been born in the hut of an obscure artisan 
rather than on the throne of Castile." His minority 
had been conscientiously watched over by his uncle, 
Ferdinand I. of Aragon, Alvar de Luna, the bastard 
constable of Castile, — so famous for his enormous power 
and ignominious death on the scaffold, when Juan had 
become tired of him, — was his prime minister/ A sing- 
ing, dancing, weak-minded king, Juan's sole merit in 
history is that of being the father of the illustrious Isa- 
bella (born in 145 1). He married the Infanta Maria, 
daughter of the late King Ferdinand of Aragon, and 
then Isabel of Portugal who brought about the ruin of 
Luna. At the death of Charles the Noble, king of 
Navarre (1387-1425), the latter's son-in-law, Don Juan 
of Aragon, was proclaimed king ; and thus the house 
of Castile came to occupy three of the thrones of the 
peninsula, prophetic of their near union under Ferdi- 



A Dancing King. 237 

nand and Isabella. Navarre, from 1284 to 1328, had 
been virtually ruled by French viceroys. 

The Emirate of Granada meanwhile (1423) remained 
:n peaceful dependence on Castile, interrupted in 1430 
by the usual raids ; and Juan, instead of taking Granada, 
as he might have done, amused himself holding -Alvar 
de Luna's children over the baptismal font, or in desul- 
tory wars with Navarre and Aragon. 

Aragon from 141 6 to 1458 was ruled by Alfonso V., 
who died at Naples in 1458, and left Aragon to his 
brother Juan, king of Navarre, and the kingdom of Na- 
ples and Sicily to his natural son Ferdinand. Alfonso 
passed most of his life in his beautiful Italian domin- 
ions — a sort of royal emigre — and through him the 
politics of Aragon gravitated more and more towards 
Italy, as a precursor of the reign of his nephew, Ferdi- 
nand the Catholic. His Italian conquests were situated 
too far from his hereditary possessions to add much to 
their force. Surrounded by poets and scholars, he 
loved literature, delighted in reading Quintus Curtius 
and Caesar's Commentaries, and dismissed his musicians 
" because their harmony would never equal that of the 
divine Tully." Defeated and captured by the Genoese, 
in a great naval battle in 1435, ne Dore his captivity 
like a king, being treated and released with true mag- 
nanimity by his foe, the duke of Milan. In 1443 ne 
again entered Naples in triumph. 

The sway of Enrique IV. of Castile, called the Im- 
potent, was a long disgrace and failure of one-and- 
twenty years. Gentle and benevolent, his weaknesses 
arose from kindness of heart. A lute-player, lover of 
sad songs, founder of churches and monasteries, alms- 



238 To Ferdinand and Isabella. 

giver, brought up in unrestrained luxury, and with vo- 
luptuous tastes, he fell under the influence of the favor- 
ite Villena, as his father had done under that of Alvar 
de Luna, and left his country plunged in uncertainty as 
to the succession. 



CHAPTER XI. 
REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. 

WE have now reached a point in the history of 
Spain when the numerous petty kingdoms fill- 
ing the northern, southern, and central portions of the 
jjeninsula — Castile, Aragon, Navarre and the Moorish 
kingdom of Granada, — different as they were in charac- 
ter, race, and institutions, — were gradually amalgamated 
into one comprehensive nationality, about to enter on 
the arena of European politics and prepared to exercise 
the mighty influence which made Spain all-powerful 
under Charles V. and Philip II. 

Navarre protected by its mountainous situation, was 
still independent. Aragon, embracing the provinces of 
Aragon, Catalonia, and Valencia, possessed of free 
institutions and great moral and intellectual energy, 
commanded a wealthy and extensive commerce in the 
Mediterranean. Leon, Biscay, Galicia, Old and New 
Castile, the Asturias, Andalusia, Murcia and Estrema- 
dura, belonged to the crown of Castile, a circumstance 
which, on the consolidation of the provinces under one 
head, gave its capital, language, and literature the pre- 
eminence. 

A spirit of liberty, law, and wise legislation had been 
imprinted on the inhabitants of Spain by the Visigoths 

239 



240 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

in the fifth century, and this spirit of free and noble 
development was greatly favored by the Saracen con- 
quest of the eighth century ; for, though entirely dissim- 
ilar in political and religious institutions, the Arabs 
were tolerant, liberal, and enlightened, and insensibly 
inspired their enemies with the same principles. The 
lax morals of the clergy, under the enjoyment of long 
uninterrupted prosperity, and the luxurious habits of 
the nobles, were entirely reformed by this sudden and 
overwhelming invasion. The necessity of maintaining 
what little ground was left to them, compelled the 
Spaniards to lay the foundations of a bold and temper- 
ate character. The re-conquest was a matter of centu- 
ries. Intestine discords cost rivers of blood. Nearly 
four hundred and fifty years passed before the Span- 
iards had even advanced their line of conquest to the 
Tagus and though ultimately successful in recovering 
the lost territory, it was only after the abandonment of 
voluptuous habits and the awakening of a burning reli- 
gious enthusiasm, sullied as it was by ferocious bigotry 
and fierce fanaticism, that the Crescent of Islam began 
to wane and waver, and eventually sink, before the 
soldiers of the Cross. Romance, poetry, chivalry, 
knightly accomplishments of every sort, distinguished 
these wars. The Arabian minstrels sang the strange 
melodies of the Semitic race, rich in sensuous glow, 
hyperbole, and imagery; the Spaniards were fired by 
the magnificent ballads of the Cid, while both sides 
were characterized by more or less of Quixotic gal- 
lantry. 

The exposed position of Castile necessitated great 
vigilance, strongly fortified towns, immense levies of 




BRIDGE OF SAINT MARTIN, TOLEDO. 



& 



Associated Cities. 243 

citizens for home defence ; and along- with all this came 
many extraordinary privileges relating to municipal 
self-government, protection of life, liberty, and property, 
rights of jurisdiction, election of judicial officers, and col- 
lections and commutations of tallages and taxes, in sin- 
gular contrast with the feudal servitude of the rest of 
Europe at that day. The first Cortes was summoned in 
1 169, composed of one deputy from each city. The sanc- 
tion of the nobility and clergy was not deemed essential 
to the validity of legislative acts, while the popular 
branch would impose no tax without the consent of its 
own members, collected the revenue carefully, watched 
over appropriations and expenditures, vigilantly in- 
spected the administration of justice, entered into nego- 
tiations for alliances, voted supplies for the maintenance 
of the army, nominated regencies, insisted on their right 
to recognize the validity of a title of the crown, and occa- 
sionally even set aside the direct will of a sovereign as 
expressed in his testament. This boldness and wisdom 
seems to have characterized the Castilian corporations 
from the beginning. 

Another peculiar institution of Castile was the Her- 
mandad or Brotherhood, an association of the cities 
leagued together for the defence of their liberties in 
times of anarchy ; which was formed of deputies meet- 
ing at stated periods, transacted business under its own 
seal, and transmitted to the nobles and even the sover- 
eign the laws enacted by it. Its measures were some- 
times carried out by force. 

Agriculture, mechanical arts, manufactures, architect- 
ure, grew gradually to considerable perfection. Many of 
the cities became immensely wealthy, and despite 



244 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

sumptuary laws, expensive pleasures and luxurious 
tastes rapidly developed through the commonwealth. 

Castile, so called from the innumerable castles which 
everywhere dotted its surface, possessed a powerful and 
warlike nobility, the higher class of which was called 
ricos hombrcs, who acted in war and peace like so many 
independent sovereigns, were exempt from taxation, 
torture, or imprisonment for debt, could renounce alle- 
giance to the sovereign, appeal to private arms, monop- 
olized all the higher offices of the state, accumulated 
huge estates, and from boyhood on lived lives of turbu- 
lence, self-aggrandizement, and martial exercise. 

The hidalgos and caballeros, inferior in dignity to the 
ricos Iwmbres, likewise had great privileges and immuni- 
ties, and formed a brilliant and chivalric body, ready 
for the tilt and tourney, for warlike pageantry, or for 
attendance on the king. 

The vast influence of ecclesiastics in Spain must not 
be overlooked, more especially as they vigorously co- 
operated in the wars against the infidel, led the soldiers 
to battle, sometimes crucifix in hand, and from the 
beginning exercised a marked ascendency over the 
minds of the people. Illiberal, licentious, often shame- 
lessly insensible even to the simplest rules of a moral 
and decent life, abounding in revenues, religious estab- 
lishments, and privileges, they powerfully affected all 
classes of Spanish society; while the primacy of Spain, 
exercised by the archbishop of Toledo, was, after the 
papacy, the most splendid gift in the possession of the 
church. 

Along with the wonderfully liberal organization of 
the popular institutions went a singular limitation of 



Development of National Character. 245 

royal prerogative. Though the crown, different from the 
system established by the Visigoths, was now no longer 
elective, the cortes could recognize or not, as it pleased, 
the title of the king and heir-apparent; an oath of 
allegiance was exacted from a new sovereign that he 
would keep the liberties of the cities inviolate ; the sov- 
ereign was controlled by his privy council, and could 
not alienate the royal demesne, confer pensions above a 
certain amount, or nominate to vacant benefices with- 
out its consent ; legislative powers were exercised by 
him in union with the cortes, and his judicial powers 
were circumscribed. Hence it has been well said that, 
at the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Castilian 
sovereign was possessed of less power, and the people 
of greater, than in any other European monarchy at 
that period — a fact which cannot be too emphatically 
kept in mind. Nobody imagines, however, that the sys- 
tem was perfect or worked perfectly. The Hermandad 
cultivated a spirit similar to the modern Lynch Law ; 
jealousies existed between the orders ; ministerial cor- 
ruption, lack of co-operation, apotheosis of physical 
strength, dissension, and perpetual dread of preponder- 
ance of one order over the other, existed in very great 
degree. Yet, on the whole, the Castilian people were 
fortunate indeed in enjoying a degree of freedom un- 
known even in contemporary England, which did much 
to engender that unmanageable assumption of superiority 
which slowly developed into a national characteristic. 

The union with Catalonia in the twelfth, and the con- 
quest of Valencia in the thirteenth centuries, conspired 
to render Aragon, the most formidable of the peninsula 



12-4:6 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

principalities with the exception of Castile and the Ma- 
hometan state. The princes of Aragon soon rose to 
great eminence and though extremely circumscribed in 
their constitutional powers, exercised, by means of the 
Catalan navy, the great affluence, intelligence, and lib- 
erality of the people of Barcelona, and a varied inter- 
course with foreign countries, a degree of power through 
Christendom quite disproportionate to the size and ex- 
tent of their mountainous territory. 

In 13 1 9 the three great states constituting the Ara- 
gonese monarchy were declared by Jayme II. indivisible 
and inalienable ; yet separate constitutions were main- 
tained by each ; characterized, however, by a striking 
affinity. Fragments of a written constitution, said to 
date from the ninth century, give us glimpses of the 
ancient code of Aragon. Few, but powerful, ricos hom- 
bres existed in Aragon, and the immunities and privi- 
leges enjoyed by them were considerable : exemption 
from taxation, corporal and capital punishment ; unlim- 
ited criminal jurisdiction over certain classes of their 
vassals ; possession of the highest political offices j dis- 
tribution of territory re-conquered from the Moors ; re- 
nunciation, almost at will, of allegiance to the king ; the 
mischievous right of private war ; with other privileges. 
These mighty barons, however, were slowly stripped of 
their authority by Pedro II., Jayme el Vencidor, and 
Ferdinand the Catholic. To keep the aristocracy within 
bounds, haughty with their consciousness of exclusive 
privileges, and intrenched in inaccessible Pyrenean 
fastnesses, required strong measures. 

In 1287 the famous "Privileges of Union," authoriz- 
ing his subjects to resort to arms on an infringement of 



Blotted hy Royal Blood. 247 

their liberties, were signed by Alfonso III., and it was 
said that the power of the king was as nothing before 
the formidable array which this union of nobles could 
bring into the field. Pedro IV., in 1348, defeated the 
army of the Union at Epila, the last of the battles in 
which it was permitted to the subject to take up arms 
against the sovereign for the cause of liberty • and con- 
voking the assembly of the states at Saragossa, he tore 
the instrument containing the Privileges to pieces with 
his dagger. Having wounded himself during the de- 
struction of the document, Pedro suffered the blood to 
flow upon the parchment, remarking that " a law which 
had been the occasion of so much blood, should be 
blotted out by the blood of a king." Continuing the 
ancient privileges of the realm and making salutary 
concessions here and there, protecting the court of the 
Justice, which interposed a barrier between tyranny and 
the popular license, and adjudicating causes by means 
of this tribunal rather than by resort to arms, Pedro 
IV. was virtually the founder of the constitutional lib- 
erty of Aragon ; the cortes came gradually to exercise 
beneficent sway over the land ; and Aragon entered 
on a period of uninterrupted tranquillity unexampled 
among the nations of Europe at the time. The ricos 
hombres, the knights and inferior nobility, the clergy, 
and the commons, composed the fourfold branches of 
the Aragonese Cortes, and here, as in Castile, high 
consideration was given to the commons. Popular rep- 
resentation in Aragon dates back to 1133. A precise 
parliamentary etiquette prevailed ; the crown officers 
were excluded from the deliberations of the cortes \ 
great scrupulousness in maintaining rights, forms, and 



248 Reign of Ferdinand mid Isabella. 

dignities was preserved ; subjects under deliberation 
were referred to committees ; a single formally regis- 
tered veto from any member could defeat the passage 
of a bill, and the highest deliberative, judicial, and leg- 
islative functions, questions of war and peace, taxes, 
application of revenues to their specific purposes, the 
succession of the crown, removal of obnoxious minis- 
ters, imposition of sumptuary regulations, and granting 
or withholding of supplies, rested in their hands. 

The General Privilege, granted by Pedro the Great 
in 1283, is the broadest basis of Aragonese liberties, 
and is distinguished by the equitable protection afforded 
to all classes ; it scrutinizes the administration of jus- 
tice, investigates the powers of Cortes, preserves legal 
immunities, and secures property against crown exac- 
tions. 

The Justice — an institution peculiar to Aragon — 
had supreme control in matters judicial ; he was the 
king's counsellor ; he administered the coronation oath ; 
he interposed authority between subject and sovereign, 
pronounced on the validity of royal ordinances, con- 
curred with Cortes in suits against the crown, consti- 
tuted a tribunal of appeal from territorial and royal 
judges, could remove prisoners from the jurisdiction of 
an inferior court into that of his own, and secure a de- 
fendant from molestation on his giving surety for his 
appearance. 

Such is an outline of the extraordinary prerogatives 
of this supreme court, contained within the personality 
of a single individual. 

The purity and integrity of the court were maintained 
by a long line of illustrious incumbents, who checked 




AN ARABIAN WELL, TOLEDO. 



Catalonia and Valencia. 251 

the usurpations of the crown, exerted a benign influ- 
ence on society, and substituted peaceful arbitrament 
for sanguinary revolution. The last of forty-nine Jus- 
tices was but to death by Philip II. 

The governmental arrangements of Catalonia and 
Valencia were so similar to those of Aragon, saving the 
Justicia, that they do not demand separate discussion. 
The beautiful city of Barcelona, capital of Catalonia, was 
early distinguished for municipal privileges, unrivalled 
commercial prosperity, factories and manufactures of 
every kind. Cleanliness, splendor, and the benignity 
of an unsurpassed climate, contributed to its popularity 
and architectural excellence. The gorgeousness of the 
municipal processions recalls Venice \ the democratic 
institutions of the town cultivated independence of 
bearing; and the glory of Catalan, song, the illustrious 
troubadours of Catalonia, beautiful and poetic devotion 
" to the virgin, love, arms, and other good usages," ri- 
valled, if they did not surpass, the reputation of the 
neighboring Provence, with which Catalonia was long 
united. 

Such is a condensed outline of the state of things in 
Aragon and Castile, previous to the birth of Ferdinand 
and Isabella — events occurring respectively, April 22, 

145 1 (birth of Isabella, at Madrigal), and March 10, 

1452 (birth of Ferdinand, at Sos in Aragon). 

After long intestine feuds, bitter foreign wars, and a 
disputed succession, the tranquillity of Castile seemed 
at length secured by the marriage of Enrique III. with 
Catharine of Lancaster. But the premature death of 
Enrique, at the age of twenty-eight, blighted the hopes 
of the House of Trastamara, which had succeeded to 



252 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

the throne in 1368, and left the government in the 
hand of his son, Juan II., a minor, during whose reign 
the greatest disasters befell Castile. Admirably gov- 
erned during Juan's minority, the kingdom was at 
length delivered into his hands, when his incapacity 
for governing, his love of pleasure, and his blind sub- 
jection to favorites, soon became obvious. Alvaro de 
Luna, a bastard of the house of Aragon, distinguished 
for the brilliancy of his talents and accomplishments — 
a skilful rider, dancer, fencer, musician, poet, — fear- 
less, ambitious, and finished in the arts of dissimula- 
tion, — soon exercised unbounded influence over the 
pleasure-loving king. A miser, spendthrift, embezzler, 
epicure, Luna aggrandized himself and his kindred at 
the expense of the kingdom, affected royal magnify 
cence in his expenditures and retinue, won the blind 
partiality of the king, and so disgusted the nobles by his 
haughtiness and intolerance that they soon organized 
confederacies to hurl him from his exalted station. 
Even Juan's own son Enrique took sides with the aris- 
tocracy against the favorite, and a prolonged period of 
anarchy and civil war set in. The commons began to 
lose all their hard-earned constitutional rights, and 
many iniquitous schemes of oppression, utterly repug- 
nant to the acknowledged law of the land, were intro- 
duced and carried out by the favorite. The Cortes was 
reduced to deputations from seventeen or eighteen 
cities, while the non- represented cities transmitted their 
instructions through the deputies of the privileged ones, 
the interests of the whole country were no longer rep- 
resented, and an insidious system, calculated to under- 



Literature. 253 

mine the political system completely, threatened the 
absolute subversion of the ancient fueros of Castile. 

Singularly enough, during this epoch literature throve. 
Juan himself was an accomplished Latin scholar and 
poet. The marquis of Villena devoted his life to let- 
ters, translated Dante and the JEneid, and refined and 
civilized the tastes of his countrymen by numerous 
works on poetry, the gay science, and astronomy. The 
marquis of Santillana wrote moral poems and redoii- 
dillas with grace. Juan de Mena, a genius of the high- 
est order, composed his " Laberinto " after the model of 
the Divina Commedia, and combined in it a simplicity, 
vigor, beauty, and energy which frequently recall the 
great Italian. Alfonso de Baena, a converted Jew, 
wrote with elegance, and compiled an anthology, or can- 
cionero of the fugitive pieces of many of the smaller 
luminaries. The very clash of arms proved propitious 
to literary development. 

Meanwhile, on the death of Juan's first wife, Maria 
of Aragon, Alvaro de Luna, the all-powerful minister, 
opposing Juan's desire for a union with a daughter of 
the king of France, succeeded in bringing about a 
match with Isabella, granddaughter of Joa I. of Portu- 
gal ; but his conduct becoming offensive to the queen, 
she succeeded in ruining him with the king ; possession 
was obtained of his person by a violation of the royal 
safe-conduct; he was sentenced to death; and clad in 
sable, deserted by friends, and conducted ignominiously 
to the scaffold, he was miserably executed. The 
wretched king died, lamenting his misspent life, July 
21, 1454, having reigned forty-eight years, and leaving 
three children, Enrique, who succeeded him, Alfonso, 



254 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

and Isabella. The town of Cuellar, with its territories 
and a considerable sum of money were left to the 
Infanta Isabella. 

Ferdinand the Catholic was the son of Juan II. of 
Aragon and the bold and versatile Juana, daughter of 
Don Federigo Henriquez, admiral of Castile. Ferdi- 
nand I. was elected to the vacant throne of Aragon 
in 1 410, when it had become vacant by the demise of 
Martin. Alfonso V., the conqueror of Naples, suc- 
ceeded his father Ferdinand, but resided so continually 
in that delightful and intellectual kingdom that Aragon 
was really ruled by his brother Juan, lieutenant-general 
of Aragon. This prince married twice ; first Blanche, 
daughter of Charles III. of Navarre, and widow of Mar- 
tin of Sicily, leaving three children, Carlos, prince of 
Viana, Blanche, repudiated wife of Enrique IV. of Cas- 
tile, and Eleanor, wife of Gaston de Foix ■ afterwards 
(1447). Juana of Castile as before described. Carlos 
was heir of the kingdom of Navarre by right of inher- 
itance through his mother, the elder Blanche, but per- 
ceiving probably that his father did not care to relinquish 
the title of king of Navarre, he permitted him to retain 
the title, provided he himself should be left the actual 
sovereignty. Juana, the new queen, attempted by her 
husband's authority to divide the administration of the 
government with Carlos, when civil war burst forth, 
revealing the wretched spectacle of father and son 
arrayed against each other. The party of Prince Carlos 
were entirely defeated in 1452. 



CHAPTER XII. 

REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. 
[continued.] 

THE birth of Ferdinand the Catholic, in 1452, was 
welcomed with a delight in strange contrast with 
the suspicion and dislike with which the king regarded 
the offspring of his former marriage. 

The frank and affable Carlos retired to Naples, whose 
kino-, Alfonso, died in 1458, bequeathing his heredi- 
tary possessions, in Spain, Sicily, and Sardinia, to his 
brother Juan, while Naples fell to his illegitimate son 
Ferdinand. Carlos, after a reconciliation with his 
father in 1460, imagined that his title as heir- apparent 
to the crown of Aragon would be immediately acknowl- 
edged ; but in this he was grossly deceived. His con- 
duct was misconstrued ; he was perfidiously arrested 
and imprisoned by his father ; but such was the devotion 
of his Catalonian subjects to him that they broke out 
in open rebellion, and Juan was compelled to liberate 
his prisoner. But falling ill of a fever, Carlos expired 
September 23, 1461, having bequeathed Navarre to his 
sister Blanche and her descendants conformably to the 
marriage contract of his parents. Blanche, falling into 
the hands of her inhuman sister, Eleanor de Foix, died 
by poison. In 1461 Ferdinand was acknowledged by 
the Aragonese deputation heir-apparent of Aragon, but 

2 55 



256 Reign of Ferdinand mid Isabella, 

Catalonia, passionately devoted to the memory of the 
lamented Carlos, refused allegiance, and offered its 
crown first to Don Pedro of Portugal, and then to Rene 
the Good of Aragon, famous from the fiction of Sir 
Walter Scott. The long and terrible civil war ended in 
1472, after the surrender of Barcelona, when the Cata- 
lans returned to their allegiance and sturdily main- 
tained that despite what they had done they should be 
proclaimed throughout the kingdom, good, faithful, and 
loyal subjects ; which, says the historian, was accord- 
ingly done. 

The profligate brother of Isabella, Enrique IV. of 
Castile, though full of a certain sort of graciousness, 
condescension, and munificence, and at one time ex- 
tremely popular for his chivalrous aspirations and his 
romantic expeditions against the Moors of Granada, 
gradually lost his popularity, fell into habits of de- 
bauchery, repudiated his wife, Blanche of Aragon, after 
a union of twelve years, and in 1455 completed his dis- 
grace by espousing the sparkling and reckless Juan a of 
Portugal, sister of the reigning sovereign Alfonso V. 
In this reign the clergy became scandalously unfaithful 
to their duties, the coin of the realm was shamelessly 
adulterated, the king abandoned himself to unworthy 
favorites : these favorites themselves, after being lifted 
to the skies, fell from their high estate, and organized 
a powerful confederation of the nobles to oppose the 
arbitrary doings of the king. Enrique was publicly 
deposed by this confederation at Avila, in 1465, and 
the young prince Alfonso was seated on the vacant 
throne ; but an accommodation ultimately took place 



Isabella and J/")- Suitors. 257 

between the conflicting parties and tranquillity was for 
a short time restored. 

The operations of the confederates against the au- 
thority of Enrique were totally disconcerted by the 
death of Alfonso, their young leader, in 1468. As there 
is little evidence to prove that Enrique's deposition was 
ever confirmed by act of cortes, Alfonso's so-called 
reign may be regarded as a usurpation and dismissed as 
such. The crown was now offered to Isabella, who 
had continued with Enrique's family during these dis- 
turbances ; but she unhesitatingly refused it as long as 
her brother Enrique lived. A negotiation was then 
begun between the combatants, which resulted in a 
general amnesty and the recognition of Isabella as 
heiress of the crown of Castile and Leon. The prin- 
cess immediately became the object of a brilliant mat- 
rimonial competition — a brother of Edward IV. of 
England ; the duke of Guienne, brother of Louis XL of 
France, and heir presumptive of the French monarchy ; 
Alfonso, king of Portugal, and Ferdinand, of Aragon, 
were among the suitors for her hand. All others were 
rejected in favor of the lucky Ferdinand, to the great 
delight of Ferdinand's father, who was most keenly 
alive to the importance of consolidating the scattered 
monarchies of Spain under one head. The marriage 
of Ferdinand and Isabella had always been his darling 
scheme, and the marriage articles were signed and 
sworn to by Ferdinand at Cervera. January 7/1469. 

As these articles are important, it will be well to 
enumerate them in outline. Ferdinand promised faith- 
fully to respect the laws and usages of Castile ; to fix 
his residence in Castile and not quit it without Isa- 



258 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

bella's consent ; to prefer no foreigners to municipal or 
military offices without her approbation ; to alienate 
none of the crown property ; to resign to her the exclu- 
sive right of nomination to ecclesiastical benefices ; to 
subscribe all ordinances of a public character jointly 
with her ■ to prosecute the Moorish war, respect King 
Enrique, leave the nobles unmolested in the possession 
of their dignities and emoluments, and not demand 
restitution of the domains formerly owned by his father 
in Castile. 

All the essential rights of sovereignty rested in Isa- 
bella's hands. 

Owing to the difficulties and dangers of the times, 
the critical situation of Isabella, who was vigilantly 
watched by Villena and his spies, and even in peril of 
being seized by him with the intent of defeating the mar- 
riage, Ferdinand stole off in disguise, accompanied by 
half a dozen attendants, and managed, with great secrecy, 
expedition, and hardship, to reach Valladolid, where 
Isabella had now taken refuge. Their marriage was pub- 
licly celebrated October 19, 1469, in the palace of Juan 
de Vivero, the temporary residence of the princess, but 
subsequently appropriated to the chancery of Valladolid. 
The fair-complexioned, quick-eyed, cheerful, and chiv- 
alrous Ferdinand was celebrated for his horsemanship, 
his eloquence, his courteous and insinuating manners, 
and the temperance, activity, and simplicity of his hab- 
its ; and his presence made a sensible impression on 
the blue-eyed and chestnut-haired Isabella. Her beauty, 
intelligence, and sensibility, the grace of her manners, 
the symmetry and serenity of her features and temper, 
her fine intellectual and moral gifts, the elegance with 



Isabella s Charms. 259 

which she spoke the Castilian, her modesty and the 
simple beauty of her demeanor, charmed her contem- 
poraries and have made them hand her down to us dis- 
tinguished by every excellence that can adorn and 
beautify a beloved sovereign. Grace, benignity, serene 
magnanimity, devotion, — such were her characteristics ; 
while with these were combined acute intellectual pow- 
ers, great administrative abilities and homely household 
virtues but rarely found united in one and the same 
person. 

On the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, a con- 
spiracy of the nobles determined to oppose to Isabella's 
claims those of her niece Juana, then nine years old, 
and supposed to be the illegitimate daughter of the 
queen, second wife of Enrique. A faction, made for- 
midable by the powerful names and interests of the 
Pachecos, Mendozas, Zunigas, Velascos, and Punentels, 
who had so recently sworn adhesion to Isabella, now 
menaced her with destruction and plunged the realm 
into another of those "spells" of anarchy which peri- 
odically seized it. Savagery of every description, brig- 
andage, feuds between the blood-thirsty nobles, mal- 
administration in every shape and form, loathsome 
details of wretchedness, famine, devastation, lust, make 
a picture upon which the mind does not willingly dwell. 
It would be futile to pursue the threads of brutality, 
chicane, and insincerity pervading the involved negoti- 
ations, the furious discords, the pitiless wars going on 
both in Aragon and Castile, till the illness and death of 
Enrique, in 1474, extinguished the male line of the 
house of Trastamara and gave a short breathing space 
to the nation. Squandered revenues, worthless para- 



260 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

sites, justice unredressed, treasury bankrupt, Castile 
dismembered, hypocrisy, audacity, and faithlessness- in 
public and private engagements rampant ; such is the 
epitaph of Enrique IV. of Castile and Leon. 

At Segovia, December 13, 1474, in the public square of 
the quaint old Castilian city, surrounded by gorgeously 
clad functionaries and invoking the benediction of 
heaven on her ensuing reign — a tableau heightened 
by the exquisite Spanish sunshine, the fantastic old 
colonnaded houses, the singularly beautiful situation of 
the city with its grouped and castellated hills, the lofty 
presence of the majestic and slender-columned cathe- 
dral, and the countless variegation of clanging bells, 
floating standards, te Deums, and brilliant costumery — 
Isabella was solemnly proclaimed queen. A herald 
cried with a loud voice : " Castile, Castile, for the king 
Don Ferdinand and his consort Dona Isabel, queen 
proprietor of these kingdoms ! " 

The most popular and opulent cities of the realm 
followed the example of Segovia in acknowledging the 
accession of Isabella, and constitutional sanction to 
these proceedings was given by an assembly of the 
estates, in February. On Ferdinand's arrival from Ara- 
gon where he had been detained by the French war, a 
question arose as to whether the exclusion of females 
from the succession did not hold in Castile and Leon 
as in Aragon ; but the difficulty was removed and a 
settlement made on the basis of the original marriage con- 
tract. Isabella's great tact and good sense enabled her 
to reconcile the dissatisfied Ferdinand without compro- 
mising the prerogatives of her crown ; and though Alfon- 
so V. of Portugal attempted to vindicate the title of his 



War of the Succession. 261 

niece Juana (whom he afterward married) to the throne 
of Castile, these difficulties — known as the War of the 
Succession — were terminated by the total rout of the 
Portuguese, at the battle of Toro, and the submission of 
the entire Christian kingdom to the victorious arms of 
Ferdinand and Isabella. Peace was concluded in 1478 
between the plenipotentiaries of Castile and France, in 
which a principal article was that Louis XL, who had 
been supporting Portugal in the War of the Succession, 
should abandon this policy and give no further support 
to the pretensions of Juana. At length, a peace was 
brought about, in 1479, between the united monarchies 
and Portugal, through the instrumentality of Dona 
Beatrix of Portugal (sister-in-law of Alfonso and mater- 
nal aunt of Isabella) and Isabella herself. 

Aragon, with all its dependencies, passed to Ferdi- 
nand on the death of his father in 1479, anc ^ by a fortu- 
nate conjuncture formed with the other principalities 
the foundation of that huge sovereignty, which stretched 
its wings from Indies to Indies and had Spain as its 
imperial centre. 

A glance at the internal administration of Castile, 
after the consolidation of the monarchies, will probably 
make more intelligible to us the gradual development 
of our narrative. The thorough administration of jus- 
tice, the codification of the laws, the undermining of 
the power of the nobles, tr^e vindication of the ecclesi- 
astical rights belonging to the crown from the usurpa 
tion of the see of Rome, the regulation of trade, and 
the thorough establishment of the royal authority, sum 
up the slow but sure achievements of this reign, and 
throw a luminous significance around the figures of 
Ferdinand and Isabella. 



262 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

In 1476 Isabella, seeing no other way to check the 
license of the time, — the plundering, sanctuary-profan- 
ing, brigandage, and personal violation, — effected, with 
the aid of cortes and the junta of deputies from the 
various cities of the kingdom, a reorganization of the 
ancient institution of the Hermandad, though on an 
essentially different basis. The new code was adminis- 
tered with unsparing vigor ; was to be universal in its 
effort to maintain public order ; was to have cognizance 
of, and summary penalties for, highway robbery, house- 
breaking, rape, and resistance to justice ; was to exact 
eighteen thousand maravedis annually from every hun- 
dred households in order to equip and subsist a 
mounted policeman whose duty it was to arrest and 
punish offenders ; was to cause tocsins to be sounded 
for the apprehension of escaped criminals ; and was to 
establish a court of two alcaldes in every town of thirty 
families for the trial of crimes within the jurisdiction of 
the Hermandad. Affairs were regulated by an annually 
convened general junta. The penalties for theft were 
written in ink of blood ; criminals when punished cap- 
itally were shot to death by arrows ; and though the 
restive aristocracy made determined resistance to being 
drawn within its jurisdiction, their resistance was inef- 
fectual, and the whole kingdom soon acknowledged the 
supremacy of the Santa Hermandad. The country 
thus swarmed with an invaluable police which, though 
far from possessing the discipline, co-ordination and 
thoroughness of modern organizations, speedily rid it 
of its dens of robbers and assassins. Isabella was 
famed for the rectitude and impartiality with which 
she administered justice ■ wherever she went the Cas- 



Loyalty to Isabella. 265 

tilian chivalry flocked about her, gave her splendid 
receptions, tournaments', and tilts of reeds, and were 
eager to confess their admiration of her course for 
ridding the country of malefactors, by their loyal and 
sumptuous welcomes. The higher tribunals were also 
reformed and reorganized ; the encroachments of the 
Privy Council on the superior courts of law carefully 
limited and checked ; the chancery, or supreme court of 
appeal in civil causes, entirely remodelled ; the inter- 
ference of the crown with its jurisdiction stopped, and 
magistrates of wisdom, learning and integrity placed 
upon its benches for the lucid and faithful interpreta- 
tion of the law. 

The ancient and obsolete practice of the sovereign's 
personally presiding in the tribunals was revived, so that 
the age was enthusiastically called the golden age of 
justice, when the sovereign was seen every Friday in the 
Alcazar of Madrid dispensing justice to all such, great 
and small, as came to seek it. Order was thus re- 
established, judiciary reform initiated, the excesses of 
banditti lessened, and strongholds of violence and 
intimidation thrown down. 

The system of jurisprudence, made up fundamentally 
of the ancient Visigoth ic code, the fueros or charters of 
the Castilian princes as far back as the eleventh cen- 
tury, and the famous " Siete Partidas " or Seven Parts 
of Alfonso X, (principally a digest of the maxims of 
the civil law), was simplified and freed from the contra- 
dictory and embarrassing discrepancies, uncertainties, 
and complexities arising from this amalgamation of 
codes. Dr. Diaz de Montalvo was in 1480 charged 
with the revision of the Castilian code and the compil- 



266 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

ation of a code universally applicable to the subjects of 
the dominion. The "Ordenaucas Reales," the result 
of his labors, for four years, were printed in 1485. 
This code continued valid to Philip II.'s time, and is 
regarded as forming the foundation of the comprehen- 
sive work "La Nueva Recopilacion,' 1 which is at the 
basis of modern Spanish continental and colonial juris- 
prudence. 

Measures to repress the intolerant spirit of the 
nobles were the revival of the Hermandad, the prefer- 
ence of personal merit over rank in official preferment, 
and a revocation of the royal grants, which unconstitu- 
tionally alienated the public money to such an extent 
that, in the reign of Enrique IV., the clear annual reve- 
nue of the kingdom amounted to only thirty thousand 
ducats, so that he was contemptuously called " king of 
the highways " only. Pensions without corresponding 
services were forfeited ; purchased annuities were re- 
turned for clue reimbursement, and the remaining cred- 
itors were permitted to retain such a proportion of their 
pensions as were deemed commensurate with their ser- 
vices to the state. Thirty millions of maravedis were 
thus annually saved to the crown : literary and charit- 
able establishments were permitted to enjoy their in- 
comes. In the end, we are told, by these sagacious 
economic reforms the revenues of the realm were aug- 
mented nearly twelve-fold. Hitherto the nobility had 
monopolized nearly all the remunerative posts, obtained 
possession of the greater part of the crown estates, 
coined money in their own mints like sovereign princes, 
filled the country with fortified castles, and desolated 
the land with their interminable vendetta. Now they 



The Great Military Orders. 267 

were forbidden to erect new fortresses, restrained from 
duels under penalty of treason, and prohibited from 
being attended by a mace-bearer, from quartering the 
royal arms on their escutcheons, and imitating the style 
of address used by the sovereign in his correspondence. 

The popular branch of the cortes was treated with 
great deference and it was through its cooperation prin- 
cipally that the jealous and refractory nobles were 
brought to terms. 

The grand-masterships of the great military orders of 
Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara, were annexed to 
the crown, and the orders themselves reformed. Found- 
ed originally, it is supposed, in imitation of the monastic 
orders of the Holy Land, the Spanish orders rose to 
great power and splendor, and figure largely in the 
chronicles and legendary lore of the realm. The order 
of Santiago, named after St. James, the patron saint of 
Spain, was founded in the twelfth century (1175), and 
distinguished by a sword-shaped, blood-red cross em- 
broidered on a snowy mantle ; obedience, community 
of property, and conjugal chastity were their governing 
rules ; and perpetual warfare against the infidel, defence 
of travellers, and relief to the poor, were likewise char- 
acteristic points, characteristically enforced by the fervor 
of the age. The order of Calatrava (1164) romantic- 
ally originated from a confederation of knights and 
ecclesiastics, formed to hold the town of Calatrava, on 
the frontier of Andalusia, against the Moors. The 
Templars being unable to hold this town, Sancho the 
Beloved offered it to whatever good knights would 
undertake its defence. Perpetual celibacy, — which, 
however, was " perpetuated " only to the sixteenth cen- 



268 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

tury, — plain diet, silence at meals, continual readiness 
day and night for action : such were their rules. The 
order of Alcantara (1177) was held in nominal subordi- 
nation to the knights of Calatrava, but was relieved by 
Julius II., and rose to independent importance. 

The wealth of these orders was immeasurable ; they 
had unlimited rights over their conquests ) they could 
bring into the field hundreds of belted knights and 
thousands of lances ■ their towns, castles, and convents 
covered the country ; the grand-masterships became 
posts of vast influence ; and soon so much intrigue, 
danger, and bad blood developed when a vacancy 
occurred that, in 1476, the queen succeeded in secur- 
ing the administration of one of the grand-masterships 
(that of Santiago) for Ferdinand; that of Calatrava 
followed in 1487, and of Alcantara in 1494. In the 
reign of Charles V., his old teacher, Adrian VI., granted 
a bull annexing the orders in perpetuity to the Castilian 
crown ; so that soon these famous relics of religious 
chivalry lapsed into insignificance, more particularly as 
their great life-work, the subjugation of the Moors, had 
been accomplished. 

The encroachments of the ecclesiastical on the lay 
tribunals — especially after the permanent establishment 
of the canon law, due to the promulgation of the 
" Siete Partidas" in the thirteenth century — were re- 
sisted. Here, as elsewhere in its institutions, mediaeval 
Spain was singularly independent. It is said that even 
the Romish ritual was not admitted into its churches till 
long after it had been adapted in the rest of Europe. 
Ferdinand and Isabella even proclaimed their intention 
of inviting the princes of Christendom to unite with 



Salutary Changes. 269 

them in convoking an oecumenical council for the refor- 
mation of the abuses of the church. Sixtus IV. reluc- 
tantly yielded to Isabella's demand that the higher 
Spanish benefices should be filled with native Castil- 
ians; and thus the queen proceeded, as occasion per- 
mitted, to place persons eminent for virtue, piety, and 
learning, in the conspicuous strongholds of Catholicism. 

Famines, pestilences, languishing agriculture, ruined 
commercial and financial credit, debasement of the 
coin, were a few of the memories and legacies be- 
queathed the Catholic kings by their immediate prede- 
cessors ; a state of things bettered, as far as might be, 
on the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella. Salutary 
changes of every description were introduced ; internal 
communications facilitated • foreign trade protected ; 
the public credit re-established by the punctuality with 
which the government met its engagements; arbitrary 
imposts were repealed ; different denominations of coin 
had a legal standard value affixed ; and royal mints 
were established to infuse life and vigor into the cur- 
rency. In five years the revenues increased five-fold ; 
agriculture and architecture began to flourish again, 
and capital to flow into the country ; " what many 
men," says old Pulgar, " and grand lords were unable 
to do in many years, a solitary woman, with her own 
toil and talents, did in a little while." 

The sober wisdom, noble demeanor, liberality, and 
affectionate solicitude of the queen ; the resolution, 
self-restraint, and scrupulous economy of the king ; and 
the harmonious and elevated character of the relations 
existing between these eminent sovereigns, tended to 
establish the royal authority on a rock impregnable, 



270 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

and make it undisputed alike at court and throughout 
the provinces. 

The permanent establishment of the Spanish Inqui- 
sition took place in the reign of Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella ; and the conquest of Granada (1481-92), with all 
its romantic and pathetic associations, filled more than 
ten years of its middle period. Beginning in 1481, and 
carried on with an infinity of surprises, expeditions, 
storming-parties, sieges, capitulations, and evolutions, 
conducted under great difficulties, from lack of funds 
on the part of the Spaniards, and with courage and 
obstinacy on the part of the Moors, this war lasted till 
January, 1492, involved much slaughter on both sides, 
and was finally brought to a triumphant conclusion after 
incessant hostilities. 

A special chapter has been reserved for the achieve- 
ments of the Spanish navigators who so gloriously illus- 
trated this memorable reign, and carried the name of 
Ferdinand and Isabella, of Spain, and of the Catholic 
religion, across the dim and undiscovered seas. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

SUBJUGATION OF THE MOORS. —CONQUEST OF 
GRANADA. 

THE time had now come when two independent 
nationalities — the Spanish and the Moorish — 
could no longer exist side by side in the peninsula. 
For eight centuries Spain had been the battle-ground 
of alien races. After its almost total subjugation by 
Taric the One-eyed and Mousa, the Christians had 
gradually, one by one, century by century, reconquered 
and recovered the lost territories. The west, the east, 
and the north again owned the sovereignty of Catholic 
kings. But the south, more beautiful and fertile than 
any part of Spain, was filled with Moslem cities, Mos- 
lem civilization, the grace and elegance of Moslem art 
and architecture, the renown of Moslem scholars, the 
beauty and chivalry of Moslem knighthood. Worse 
than all, the Crescent blazed triumphantly over against 
the Crucifix, and hatreds engendered by irreconcilable 
creeds were rife, to stimulate men to chivalrous encoun- 
ter, and make them vanquish or die in the glorious con- 
flict of Infidel and Believer. A momentous struggle — 
long foreseen, long inevitable — now broke out, involv- 
ing many-sided interests — ambition, religion, desire for 

271 



272 Subjugation of the Moors. 

ascendency, personal revenge, avarice, envy, new fields 
for the Inquisition, new opportunities for glory and self- 
aggrandizement. A struggle so important in its influ- 
ence on Spanish development, and so passionate and 
long-continued in the obstinacy with which it was fought 
out, demands more than a cursory consideration, even 
apart from the fact that it is the most gorgeous and dra- 
matic episode of Spanish history. With a preliminary 
glance at the theatre of these wonderful scenes, the de- 
scription of the ten years' war may be resumed. 

Andalusia, the tierra de Maria Santisima, as it is poet- 
ically called, — the land specially favored by the Most 
Holy Virgin, — is the most delectable of all the Spanish 
provinces. In the time of the Moors it corresponded to 
the four kingdoms of Seville, Cordova, Jaen, and Gran- 
ada, now however (1881), eight in number, known as 
the provinces of Seville, Huelva, Cadiz, Jaen, Cordova, 
Granada, Almeria, and Malaga. The etymology of the 
word — according to Dozy a corruption of Vauda/usia, 
from the Vandals, who overran the south of Spain after 
the disintegration of the Roman empire ; according to 
others from the Moorish term Andalosh, Land of the 
West — need not detain us long. The singular geo- 
graphical features of its thirty-three thousand square 
miles give the clue to the rugged and stubborn resis- 
tance of the Moors of the fifteenth century to the arms 
of the most Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella. 

In the loveliest atmosphere in the world rise vast 
ranges of serrated, ruddy-peaked mountains, within 
which are interleaved delicious valleys, sometimes 
opening on an azure estuary of the purple-watered 
Mediterranean, sometimes locked in by inaccessible 



Andalusian Scenery. 275 

precipices. Gigantic mountain domes loom up to the 
height of nearly twelve thousand feet and pierce the 
air with a penetrating and perennial coolness. The 
mountains of the Sun and Air, the Sierra of Snow, of 
Vermilion, of Gador, of Arsohe, of Morena, of Susan a, 
break and intersect the face of the country into a thou- 
sand slopes, glens, dales, eagles' eyries, and undulating 
plains. Eight or ten rivers with their affluents send 
sluggish or silvery torrents, according to the season, 
through the country, which now expands into pictur- 
esque vegas overflowing with the wild olive, the citron, 
the caper-bush, the aloe, the cactus, the palm, lemon, 
and orange, the evergreen oak, the silk-festooned mul- 
berry, the snowy cotton and bending cane, now shoots 
up into cliffs of dazzling height surmounted by dragon- 
like castles. These mountains are richly variegated 
with threads of silver, gold, lead, copper, iron, coal, 
and precious marbles; the land is golden with autumnal 
wheat ; the landscape is populous with cities of great 
interest to artist, antiquary, and ecclesiologist ; the 
plantations are famous for their bulls, horses, sheep, 
and swine ; and the ready wit, versatility, genius, and 
good humor of the inhabitants have passed into a prov- 
erb; The sparkling beauty of the Andalusian women, 
with their dark complexions, small figures, and pleasant 
Castilian dialect ; the handsome, lazy, boastful men ; 
the ever-sounding song, the ever-living dance ; the 
superstition and sensuality of all classes ; the illiteracy, 
munificence, and carelessness so characteristic of the 
Andalusians; all these details and dispositions were 
favored and developed by a voluptuous climate and 



276 



Subjugation of the Moors. 



are still, to-day, equally with five centuries ago, peculiar 
to the population. 

In this paradise of the south of Spain broke out one 
of the most sanguinary conflicts known to history. 
From the nature of the country as well as from the 
character of the combatants, the contest was bound to 
be protracted. In its length, picturesqueness, and epi- 
sodic character it has frequently been compared to the 
Trojan war ; and it is even more than singular that this 
swan-song of the crusades did not breathe itself elo- 
quently forth in the melting verse of some Spanish 
Tasso. As it is, it is even richer in poetry and romance 




FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. 



than the wars of the Holy Land and though commem- 
orated in no grand epical "Lay of the Saracens," is em- 
balmed in innumerable ballads fraught with the tender- 
est pathos and music. 

As early as 1466, Muley Abul Hacen, son of the 



Abul Hacen and Granada. 277 

Aben Ismail who ruled in Granada in the reign of 
Juan II. and Enrique IV., had succeeded his father and 
was prompted by an impetuous disposition to violate 
the truce which his father had established between the 
Moors and the Spaniards. On Ferdinand's demanding, 
in 1476, payment of the annual tribute levied by his 
predecessors, Abul Hacen insolently retorted that " the 
mints of Granada coined no longer gold, but steel." 
Crouching like a lion in his noble city of Granada — 
the city of seventy thousand houses, of walls three 
leagues in circuit, furnished with twelve gates and 1030 
towers, of the commanding palace of the Alhambra, 
capable of containing a garrison of forty thousand men, 
of the incomparable Vega thirty-seven leagues in cir- 
cumference, of orchards and gardens, and silver wind- 
ings of the Xenil infinite — Abul Hacen might well 
think himself invincible. Few cities, indeed, if we may 
put faith in the eulogies of Spanish and Arabian writ- 
ers, ever surpassed Granada in luxury, refinement, and 
prodigality. We read of girdles and bracelets and 
anklets of gold and silver for the women, wrought with 
exquisite art and delicacy, studded with jacinths, emer- 
alds, and chrysolites j of braided and beautifully deco- 
rated hair confined in links of sparkling jewels ; of 
garments of wool, silk or cotton of the finest texture 
for the men, beautifully variegated. Linen of spotless 
whiteness for the summer, armor chased and inlaid with 
gold, enamelled scimitars, blades, and daggers of Da- 
mascus and Fez, decorated with Koranic texts, sump- 
tuously caparisoned horses, lances of matchless temper, 
legions of Andalusian barbs, are said to have been the 
commonplaces of these most serene principalities. A 



278 Subjugation of the Moors. 

brilliant chivalry filled the city ; the most generous 
rivalry existed between the Moslem and Christian 
cavaliers. Owing to the singular reservations of the 
truce made between the rival races, hostilities had 
been but partially suspended. The Moorish frontier 
towards Jaen was not included in it, and was left open 
as the play-ground of the contending bands. Provision 
was even found in the truce for sudden forays, unex- 
pected attacks on castles and towns undertaken without 
trumpet or banner, or investments of towns within a 
period of three days. The truce required twelve thou- 
sand doblas of gold to be annually paid the Christians, 
or in default thereof the liberation of six hundred 
Christian captives. If captives were not to be got, the 
same number of Moors were to be delivered up at the 
city of Cordova. 

When Don Juan de Vera was sent in 1476 to demand 
the payment of arrearages and the fulfilment of the 
treaty stipulations, the haughty answer already cited 
was returned. A report was made to the Castilian sov- 
ereigns of the condition of things in Granada, and it 
was found that Abul Hacen's kingdom now contained 
fourteen cities, ninety-seven fortified places, and many 
formidable castles. Deferring hostilities for the present, 
Ferdinand with characteristic caution determined to re- 
duce the kingdom by inches, plucking out hair by hair, 
subjugating fortress by fortress, garnering grain by grain 
into his granary, until, as an historian reports, " he had 
picked out the seeds of this pomegranate one by one.*' 

Fortunately for the Christians their cause was aided 
by the implacable rivalries existing among the Moors 
themselves, and rending their ranks into those who fa- 




MOORISH ARCHES OF THE ALCAZAR, SEVILLE. 



A Romantic Episode. 281 

vored the cause of the Sultana Ayxa the Chaste — the 
first wife of Abul Hacen, daughter of Mohammed VII. 
(surnamed the Left-handed), mother of Boabdil — and 
those who favored the cause of Zoraya, Maid of the 
Morning Star, originally a Christian slave, but deli- 
cately nurtured and brought up in the Mahometan 
faith, the favorite sultana of Abul Hacen. The pres- 
ence of these women throws a strange and romantic 
glamour over this memorable war and lightens its 
ferocity with many a detail of graceful and tender pa- 
thos. Ambitious, beautiful, passionate, intriguing, Zo- 
raya swayed the amorous Abul Hacen despotically, and 
was anxious riiat one or the other of her two sons 
should eventually reign over the kingdom. Surrounded 
by an influential faction headed by the vizier Abul Ca- 
cem Vanegas, Zoraya had good hope that her expecta- 
tions should be gratified. Ayxa, on the contrary, was 
upheld by the powerful family of the Abencerrages and 
by Aben Comixer, Alcayde of the Alhambra. The 
beauteous palace resounded with their controversies 
and recriminations, and the noise of the scandal was 
spread abroad through the kingdom, constituting a 
source of fruitful apprehension to the graver and more 
reflecting Moslems. 

Close upon the heels of these dissensions followed 
the capture of Zahara in 1481, a Christian fortress 
which proved an irresistible lure to the enterprising 
mind of Abul Hacen, and led the way to all the subse- 
quent disasters of the Moors. The garrison was put to 
the sword and Hacen returned in triumph to Granada 
where, instead of being received with acclaim for his 
valiant deed, he was welcomed by lamentations, dismal 



282 Subjugation of the Moors. 

prophecies, and the outcries of a religious enthusiast, 
who predicted the speedy downfall of Granada for this 
unprovoked massacre 

The capture of Zahara roused infinite indignation 
among the Christian cavaliers, already renowned for 
the irascibility of their tempers, the boundless zeal with 
which they fought for the faith, and the turbulence and 
independence of their spirit. Preparations were there- 
fore at once made to earn- the war with lire and sword 
into the heart of the territories of the Moors. The 
estates of the marquis of Cadiz lay adjacent to these 
territories — a fact which was speedily signalized by a 
brilliant achievement, serving as a jDrologue to the war. 
Illustrious in lineage, distinguished as a champion of the 
faith, well known for vigor, valor, munificence to friend, 
magnanimity to foe, — a slight, ruddy-faced, blonde- 
haired, intrepid figure, — Roderigo Ponce de Leon, 
marquis of Cadiz, became the cynosure of all eyes in 
this war and did deeds and achieved glory comparable 
to the knightly and half-mythical actions cf the Tan- 
creds, the Baldwins, Bernardo del Carpio, and the Cicl. 
Learning that Alhama. a wealthy and populous place a 
few leagues from Granada, was but slightly garrisoned, 
he determined to surprise it one moonless night, and 
make its capture counterbalance the capture of Zahara, 
Setting out noiselessly to the number of four thousand 
foot and three thousand cavalry, and winding as stealth- 
ily as tigers over the rugged and dangerous mountain- 
roads, the marquis and his men succeeded in surprising 
Alhama two hours before daybreak. 

Boundless was the satisfaction of the Spaniards when 
they heard of this victory, and boundless the grief and 



" Woe is me, Alhama." 283 

anger of the people of Granada. The agitation caused 
by this memorable event has been mirrored for us in a 
plaintive Spanish romance delicately rendered by Lord 
Byron, who in his translation has combined two ballads, 
one with the refrain, " Ay de mi, Alhama ! " 

The Moorish King rides up and down 
Through Granada's royal town ; 
From Elvira's gates to those 
Of Bivarambla on he goes. 

Woe is me, Alhama! 

Letters to the monarch tell 
How Alhama's city fell : 
In the fire the scroll he threw, 
And the messenger he slew. 

Woe is me, Alhama ! 

He quits his mule and mounts his horse, 
And through the street directs his course : 
Through the street of Zacatin, 
To the Alhambra spurring in. 

Woe is me, Alhama ! 

When the Alhambra walls he gained, 
On the moment he ordained 
That the trumpet straight should sound 
With the silver clarion round. 

Woe is me, Alhama ! 

And when the hollow drums of war 
Beat the loud alarm afar, 
That the Moors of town and plain 
Might answer to the martial strain. 

Woe is me, Alhama ! 

Then the Moors by this aware, 
That bloody Mars recalled them there 
One bv one, and two by two, 
To a mighty squadron grew. 

Woe is me, Alhama! 



284 Subjugation of the Moors. 

Out then spake an aged Moor 
In these words the king before : 
" Wherefore call on us, O King ? 
What may mean this gathering ? " 

Woe is me, Alhama I 

" Friends, ye have alas to know 
Of a most disastrous blow; 
That the Christians, stern and bold, 
Have obtained Alhama's hold." 

Woe is me, Alhama! 

And from the windows o'er the walls 
The sable web of mourning falls ; 
The king weeps as a woman o'er 
His loss, for it is much and sore. 

Woe is me, Alhama t 

It is said that many of the people of Granada made 
their way to the Alhambra weeping, and " Accursed," 
cried they to Abul Hacen, " be the day that thou hast 
lit the flame of war in our land. May the holy prophet 
bear witness before Allah that we and our children are 
innocent of this act ! Upon thy head, and upon the 
heads of thy posterity, until the end of the world, rest 
the sin of the desolation of Zahara ! " 

Abul Hacen, however, was no sentimentalist. With 
astonishing speed he gathered together an army of three 
thousand horse and fifty thousand foot, and swept forth 
from the gates of Granada to exterminate the handful 
of Christians at Alhama. Don Alonzo de Aguilar, 
elder brother of the famous Gonsalvo de Cordova, made 
vain efforts to succor his besieged countrymen. He 
was compelled to withdraw and retire into the moun- 
tains. The Moslems, when they came in sight of the 
mangled bodies of their kinsmen strewn broadcast over 



Unexpected Help. 285 

the earth, or the revolting repast of troops of hunger- 
pinched dogs, were lashed into fury. They sprang like 
ravenous animals on the walls, scaled the battlements, 
and were dashed headlong down the precipices by the 
intrepid defenders. The lack of artillery to batter 
down the fortifications proved death to the Moslems 
and salvation to the Christians. Like myriads of 
wolves, the Infidels howled tempestuously round the 
ramparts, glared with bloodshot eyes at the impregnable 
defences which they themselves had reared, made de- 
spairing onslaughts in the face of blinding fire from 
the besiegers, and, foiled, incensed, breathless, battle- 
scarred, Hacen and his army lay writhing among the 
hills below in futile anguish and disappointment. 

Ill, however, might it have fared with the Christians, 
had not speedy succor come from an unexpected quar- 
ter. Alhama was destitute of cisterns and. fountains so 
that the Christians had to descend for water to the 
river below under the withering fire of the Moors. The 
river was diverted by the almost superhuman efforts of 
the Moorish engineers, and the garrison, the inhabitants, 
and the wounded soon suffered extremities of thirst. 
Many, it is said, died raving mad, fancying themselves 
swimming in boundless seas, yet unable to assuage their 
thirst. 

In the midst of this perilous condition of things, the 
duke of Medina-Sidonia, formerly an implacable foe of 
the marquis of Cadiz, but now softened by the suffer- 
ings of his gallant enemy and by the entreaties of the 
marchioness of Cadiz, arrived with five thousand horse 
and fifty thousand foot, accompanied by a splendid 
retinue of Andalusian chivalry. Though King Ferdi- 



286 Subjugation of the Moors. 

nand, hearing of the alarming necessity of Alhama, was 
himself hurrying to the scene of conflict, the duke 
of Medina-Sidonia forestalled him and had the glorious 
privilege of saving his hereditary foe. One powerful 
effort more was made by Abul Hacen, which was foiled, 
and the sovereign of Granada, fearing to be hemmed in 
between two armies, retired to Granada, tearing his 
beard with humiliation. 

Few scenes recorded by the historian are more exqui- 
site than the scene which ensued upon the arrival of the 
succoring army. Hostility, vengeance, hereditary feud, 
were forgotten in the delicate and princely magnanimity 
of the duke of Medina-Sidonia. The chiefs and their 
rival armies threw clown their weapons and rushed with 
gratitude and tears into one another's arms ; eternal 
friendship was sworn by the recent enemies ; the mar- 
quis and the duke marched off together like brothers 
and were sumptuously entertained in Marchena by the 
marquis of Cadiz j and ceasing from this time, the 
ancient hostility was obliterated, and a new and sacred 
friendship sprang up, sealed and cemented by the bap- 
tism of blood and tears. 

Such is a typical episode of this romantic war. 
Siege succeeded siege, foray followed on foray, army 
annihilated army, camp vanished before camp with 
swift and dizzying multiplicity. The historian is caught 
up as in a hurrying whirlwind, and borne on from battle 
to battle and sierra to sierra. It was a holy war, a 
crusade, a passionate clash between Cross and Koran, 
a grand spectacular display of tilting knights and tour- 
neying infidels. It would, therefore, be useless to pur- 
sue a microscopic chronicle of its ever-shifting vicissi- 



Civil War in Grranada. 287 

tucles. Let us chisel the potent outlines of the subju- 
gation of the Moors and the conquest of Granada on 
our memories, and leave the myriad details to works of 
greater compass and richer elaboration. 

Civil war had meanwhile been raging in Granada. 
With a population of unprecedented instability, Granada 
beheld during this war a series of revolutions and 
counter-revolutions, plots and counterplots unparalleled 
in her history. Boabdil, threatened by his father Abul 
Hacen, had fled to Guadix, not far from the capital city, 
where a host of adherents gathered around him. Abul 
Hacen, received with groans and execrations by his 
people after his return from the campaign of Alhama, 
had retired for a day to a delicious country-seat, situated 
on the mountain of the Sun near Granada, where, 
wrapped in luxury and lulled by the blandishments of 
Zoraya and her women, he was endeavoring to drown 
the remembrance of his defeat in Oriental reveries. 
Suddenly, in the midst of this unwarlike dalliance, news 
was brought him that Granada was in arms, that Boab- 
dil had broken into the city, and that a tempest of rev- 
olution had swooped upon the town. Flying thither, 
Abel Hacen resisted Boabdil, but was defeated and 
driven out of the Alhambra, and Boabdil, " El Rey 
Chiquito" the Little King as he was called by the Span- 
iards, reigned over the city, — the Paris of the Spanish 
Middle ages ; paradise one moment, pandemonium the 
next. One week the Vermilion Towers of the Alhambra 
rose enveloped in light, in perfume, in aromatic gardens, 
in fountained and filagreed courts, in sparkling arabes- 
ques, in precious tranquillity, wherein the golden voice 
of Arabian verse breathed forth its plaintive and mock- 



288 Subjugation of the Moors. 

ing whispers, the next, blood-red illumination burned 
over its ensanguined turrets, and the din of arms, the 
clangor of sackbuts and cymbals, the flash of furious 
scimitars, and the blaze of the assassin and incendiary, 
sparkled and resounded through its tempest-tossed spaces. 

Swift upon the capture and defence of Alhama fol- 
lowed the disaster of Loxa to the Christians, a town in 
the possession of the Moors not far from Alhama, con- 
sidered all-important to its security. 

Abul Hacen, exasperated at the ravaging of the vega 
of Granada, resolved to retaliate, and sallied forth from 
Malaga with horse and foot to scour and devastate the 
dominions of the duke of Medina-Sidonia. His foray 
was brought to a successful close, though the Christians, 
under the valiant Pedro de Vargas, hung on his rear 
and did good service. A curious trait illustrative of 
the mode in which these wars were carried on may be 
quoted here, though perhaps one should not credit too 
absolutely the accuracy of the account. Two Christian 
captives, it is said, were summoned by Abul Hacen, and 
were asked what were the revenues of Pedro de Var- 
gas, alcayde of Gibraltar. They said that he was enti- 
tled to one out of every drove of cattle that passed his 
boundaries. " Allah forbid that so brave a cavalier 
should be defrauded of his dues," cried the warrior. 
Selecting twelve of the finest cattle he sent them to 
Pedro de Vargas, asking pardon for not having sent 
them sooner. De Vargas, in return, is said to have sent 
a scarlet mantle and a costly silken vest, apologizing at 
the same time for not having been able to give his 
Moorish majesty a warmer reception. 

A foray of the Spanish cavaliers into the mountains 



The Hill of Massacre. 289 

of Malaga about the same time ended in slaughter and 
defeat. Lost in the mountains, through the ignorance 
of their guides, wandering helplessly among the gorges 
and precipices of the sierras, at first imagining them- 
selves perfectly safe and their expedition a profound 
secret, they suddenly awoke to find every crag alive 
with the signal fires of the Moors, every cliff bristling 
with casque and lance, every declivity a rampart down 
which gigantic rocks were rolled on their devoted 
heads, and the mountains themselves tumbling about 
them. The defeat is still recorded in the Spanish cal- 
endars as the Defeat of the mountains of Malaga, and 
the spot is commemorated as the Hill of Massacre, — in 
after years a museum of whitening skeletons, weapons, 
and armor cast away in the fight. Prisoners long con- 
tinued to be brought in from the pathless mountains, 
and so great was the loss that "all Andalusia," says a 
writer of the period, " was overwhelmed by a great afflic- 
tion ; there was no drying of the eyes which wept in her." 

The consternation of the Christians formed a vivid 
contrast with the exultation of the Moors. The former 
attributed the rout to vain-glory and supercilious confi- 
dence, making it a source of edifying homilies and 
pious self-denunciation, while the latter saw in it the 
direct interposition of Allah and a pleasant augury of 
future conquest and success. 

No sooner, however, had the skies ceased ringing 
with the shouts of the Moor than, by one of those com- 
pensations continually apparent in this war, their tri- 
umph was turned into mourning. 

Boabdil el Chiquito made an incursion over the bor- 
der, and, with the help of Ali Atar, determined to elude 



290 Subjugation of the Moors. 

observation and come by surprise upon the city of Lu- 
cena. Mounted, like a veritable king of romance, upon 
a black and white horse superbly caparisoned, with, 
richly ornamented corslet of steel, lined with gaudy 
velvet, and pranked with golden nails, with head sur- 
mounted by an exquisitely chiselled and embossed 
casque, Damascus scimitar and dagger hung to belt 
and saddle-bow, and a mighty lance in hand, the Moor- 
ish king pranced forth beneath the gate of Elvira • 
but in doing so, tradition says, he broke his lance-head 
against the arch — an omen of disastrous import. While 
a bow-shot from the city, a fox ran through the whole 
army, and though pursued by a thousand missiles, es- 
caped unharmed ; another portent to the Moorish imag- 
ination. While Boabdil was leisurely scathing the 
country around Lucena, and destroying all he could, the 
count de Cabra, in the castle of Vaena, several leagues 
from Lucena, perceiving the approach of the king, man- 
aged to gather in all haste a small force of knights and 
gentlemen, and descending upon the five battalions of 
Moorish cavalry with impetuosity put the plunder-laden 
host to utter rout, drove Boabdil himself into the willows 
and tamarisks of the Mingozales river, and succeeded in 
capturing him, though he gave himself out as the son of 
Aben Alnayer, a cavalier of the royal household. His 
rank remained undiscovered till three days after the bat- 
tle, when some prisoners from Granada happening to be 
brought into the citadel of Lucena where Boabdil was 
confined, and beholding the wretched monarch stripped 
of his kingly robes, prostrated themselves before him 
with loud lamentations, and thus revealed his piteous 
secret. 




INTERIOR OF SEVILLE CATHEDRAL. 



The Alhambra Desolate. 293 

Pathetic indeed were the tears of the Moors over 
their lost king and their slain general. " Beautiful 
Granada ! " exclaimed the minstrels of the palace, ac- 
cording to a chronicler, "how is thy glory faded. The 
flower of thy chivalry lies low in the land of the stran- 
ger ; no longer does the Vivarrambla echo to the tramp 
of steed and sound of trumpet ; no longer is it crowded 
with thy youthful nobles gloriously arrayed for the tilt 
and tourney. Beautiful Granada ! the soft note of the 
lute no longer floats through thy moonlit streets; the 
serenade is no more heard beneath thy balconies ; the 
lively castanet is silent upon thy hills ; the graceful 
dance of the Zambra is no more seen beneath thy bow- 
ers ! Beautiful Granada! Why is the Alhambra so 
lorn and desolate ? The orange and myrtle still breathe 
their perfumes into its silken chambers ; the nightin- 
gale still sings within its groves, its marble halls are 
still refreshed with the plash of fountains and the gush 
of limpid rills. Alas, alas, the countenance of the 
king no longer shines within those walls. The light of 
the Alhambra is set forever." 

Abul Hacen now returned to Granada and was wel- 
comed with acclaim by its fickle population. By a 
subtle show of sympathy and magnanimity the Catholic 
sovereigns contrived to win over Boabdil completely to 
their interests. Various overtures from the rival fac- 
tions in the Moorish metropolis concerning him were 
made and rejected, and Boabdil continued to remain a 
prisoner in the hands of Ferdinand and Isabella. 
These "puissant and ostentatious" sovereigns were 
warmly entreated by the marquis of Cadiz to release 
Boabdil unconditionally \ others counselled captivity. 



294 Subjugation of the Moors. 

The opinion of the noble-minded Isabella at length 
prevailed. Boabdil was to be released on condition 
that he should remain like his forefathers a vassal of 
the Castilian crown ; military tribute must be exacted, 
military service performed, and safe-conducts and main- 
tenance guaranteed for the Christian troops that should 
pass through the places adhering to Boabdil. 
. Boabdil, after his romantic captivity at Cordova, 
entered Granada by stealth, hoping to rouse the people 
and drive his father from the Alhambra. His noble- 
hearted mother Ayxa did all she could to strengthen his 
cause, telling him that it was no time for tears or senti- 
mentality, that he had done well to throw himself reso- 
lutely into Granada, "but it must depend upon thyself 
whether thou remain here a king or a captive." 

But Boabdil, too weak to maintain himself against 
his lion-hearted father, and too vacillating to rouse per- 
sonal enthusiasm in his followers, retired in shame to 
Almeria, followed by the scorn of his mother who dis- 
dainfully remarked that he was not worthy of being- 
called a king who was not master ol his capital. 

A singular incident characteristic of the quaint spirit 
of the time accompanied the processions, illuminations, 
and festivities with which the victory of Lopera, gained 
by the Christians in 1483, was commemorated. It is said 
that Ferdinand sent the successful general, the marquis 
of Cadiz, the royal raiment he had worn on that day, 
together with the privilege for himself and his posterity 
of wearing royal robes ever afterward on Our Lady's day, 
in remembrance of his part in the enterprise. Queen 
Isabella, not to be outdone by her lord, sent her brocade 
and vestments worn the same day, to the wife of the 



A " Subtle Alchemy:' 295 

other commander, Don Luis Fernandez Puerto Carrero, 
to be worn by her during life on the anniversary of this 
battle. 

The count de Cabra, who had captured Boabdil in the 
battle of Lucena, was permitted to have as armorial 
bearings a Moor's head crowned, with a chain of gold 
round the neck in a sanguine field, and twenty-two ban- 
ners — the number captured in the fight — round the 
margin of the escutcheon. Their descendants are said 
to wear these arms to this day. 

Meanwhile the count of Tendilla kept watch in the 
castle of Alhama, which commanded the high-road to 
Malaga and a view over the vega. So vigilant was his 
watch that the historian says a beetle could not crawl 
across the vega without being seen by him. Finding 
his people growing mutinous, however, because they 
had long been unpaid, he resorted to the ingenious 
expedient of inscribing sums of money on bits of 
paper, and then compelled the people of Alhama to 
take them at their full value. The historian adds that 
this subtle alchemy of the transmutation of worthless 
paper into precious gold and silver was afterwards justi- 
fied by the redemption of the paper in real metal. 

In some of the border skirmishes of this period Fer- 
dinand was so struck by the effect of his rude artillery 
in battering down castles that he immediately multi- 
plied the number of the lombards in his possession, and 
henceforth dealt on terms of easy superiority with his 
foes. 

Coin and Cartama soon fell into the hands of Ferdi- 
nand, and the monarch then captured Ronda, an al- 
most impregnable stronghold cresting a towering rock 



296 Subjugation of the Moors. 

bathed beneath by the crystal waters of the Rio Verde, 
so exquisitely commemorated by the bishop of Dro- 
more in his translation from the Spanish. 

Rio Verde, Rio Verde, 

Many a corpse is bathed in thee 
Both of Moors and else of Christians, 

Slain with swords most cruelly. 

And thy pure and crystals waters 

Dappled are with crimson gore ; 
For between the Moors and Christians 

Long has been the fight and sore. 

Dukes and counts fell bleeding near thee, 

Lords of high renown were slain, 
Perished many a brave hidalgo 

Of the noblemen of Spain. 

Seventy-two places fell into the hands of the Chris- 
tians during this expedition, showing both the enormous 
populousness of the neighborhood and the energy of 
the king. Innumerable encounters, exasperated by 
difficulty of situation, religious intolerance, bitter recol- 
lections and boundless aspirations, ensanguined the 
sierras and kept both sides in continual wakefulness. 
El Zagal, Boabdil's uncle, invited to take command in 
Granada, proved a powerful and vindictive opponent. 

The history of the war now becomes an infinite 
flicker of light and shade, success and humiliation, 
anarchy and organization. The ebbing tide is on the 
side of the Moors, while Ferdinand with stealthy but 
indomitable persistence gradually gathers in town after 
town. Among his many failures there were many vic- 
tories, and though often discouraged, he pushed for- 
ward with a serene self-possession and hope that inspired 
all and accomplishes all. 



Boabdil at Loxa. 297 

Just after the conquest of Zalea by the knights of 
Calatrava, in 1485, the queen gave birth to Catharine 
of Aragon (Dec. 16, 1485), afterward wife of Henry 
VIII. of England. 

The death of old Abul Hacen about this time, resulted 
in a partial restoration of Boabdil to shadowy power 
in Murcia. A splendid army assembled at Cordova in 
i486 for the further prosecution of the war, and elo- 
quent are the descriptions of the vari-colored pavilions, 
the silken hangings, the gold and silver services, the 
sumpter mules and Andalusian jennets with silken hal- 
ters and embroidered housings, the feasts and revels 
and midnight cavalcades, the plumed helmets, the pol- 
ished armor blazing by torchlight, the pomp and 
pageantry of pages and lackeys, accompanying the 
assembly. Twelve thousand cavalry, forty thousand 
foot, and six thousand pioneers sallied forth against 
Loxa, with the king at their head. The historian here 
indulges in an imaginative outburst, and we are told 
that "the gay chansons of the Frenchman, singing of 
his amours on the pleasant banks of the Loire or the 
sunny regions of the Garonne ; the broad guttural tones 
of the German, chanting some doughty ki~ieger-Ued, or 
extolling the vintage of the Rhine ; the wild romance 
of the Spaniard reciting the achievements of the Cid, 
and many a famous passage of the Moorish wars ; and 
the long and melancholy ditty of the Englishman," re- 
sounded around the Castilian camp-fires. Loxa unable 
to hold out against this host, capitulated after a vigorous 
resistance, and among the captives, the unlucky Boab- 
dil, who had hastened to defend Loxa, in violation 
of his arrangement with Ferdinand, was found. 



298 Subjugation of the Moors. 

The capture of Illora and Moclin ensued, the latter 
a town on the frontier of Jaen. 

The part which Isabella took in these flying pursuits 
and sieges is thus quaintly glossed by a chronicler : 
"While the king marched in front, laying waste the 
lands of the Philistines, Queen Isabella followed his 
traces, as the binder follows the reaper, gathering and 
garnering the rich harvest that has fallen beneath his 
sickle. In this she was greatly assisted by the counsels 
of that cloud of bishops, friars, and other saintly men, 
which continually surrounded her, garnering the first 
fruits of this infidel land into the granaries of the 
church." 

The episodic character of the war gradually changed 
and was now concentrated on one of its crowning 
achievements — the siege of Malaga. 

Malaga was called " the hand and mouth of Granada." 
from its being a great seaport town and keeping open 
communication with the other Mahometan powers of 
Turkey, Egypt, and the Barbary states. In a situation 
of surpassing loveliness, and commanding a plain that 
opens like a fan on the Mediterranean, rich as some 
antique-figured tapestry, with groves of orange, olive, 
and pomegranate, the golden grain-fields of Malaga yel- 
low in an air ambered by the most passionate sunshine, 
while the perfume-sprinkled atmosphere, confined by 
lofty mountains as in a mighty transparent basin, has a 
delicacy and voluptuousness unknown elsewhere in 
Andalusia. In this epicurean abode rose the thronging 
battlements and fortresses of the Alcazaba, Gibralfaro, 
and Malaga itself, scowling defiance at the enemy, and 
serene in the consciousness of almost impregnable sites. 



The Picturesque Siege of Malaga. 801 

No sooner had Ferdinand, after the conquest of the 
neighboring town of Velez Malaga, appeared and in- 
vested the place, than the wealthy mercantile popula- 
tion, enervated by luxury, and dreading the horrors of 
a lingering siege, were desirous of surrendering. But 
Hamet El Zegri ; who commanded the crag-built castle 
of Gibralfaro opposite the city, despised the weakness 
of the population, and determined, come what would, 
to hold the place. 

An infinitely picturesque siege, embellished by every 
imaginable romantic incident, — sallies, storming parties, 
thunderings of ponderous artillery, attempts at assassi- 
nation of the king and queen by a Moorish fanatic, 
mines and counter-mines, embassies and stratagems, 
single combats and impassioned engagements, — varied 
the monotony of many months. Groves of spark- 
ling lances, legions of helms and cuirasses, battalions 
of cross-bowmen and arequebusiers, took their places 
under the walls ; and summons after summons to 
surrender, on favorable and on unfavorable terms, 
was sent in, to be rejected with scorn, by Hamet and 
his followers. Headlong rights, mutual discomfitures, 
going and coming of emissaries, vast preparations of 
carpenters and engineers, bursting of meteor-like masses 
of combustibles over the devoted city, furious resistances, 
carrying and counter-carrying of ditches, palisadoes and 
bridges, courtly grace and beauty — for Isabella was 
there — intermingled with the hideous shock, confusion, 
ferocity and havoc of war ; such was the unrivalled 
scene before Malaga. But Malaga fell. 

Boabdil, by another of the kaleidoscopic vicissitudes 
of this ever-changing war, had now succeeded in driving 



302 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

El Zagal from Granada, and ensconced in his royal 
palace of the Alhambra, sent gratulation to the Catho- 
lic sovereigns for their success, accompanied by rich 
gifts of Arabian perfumes, silks, magnificently capari- 
soned steeds, embroidered robes, richly mounted arms, 
and costly burnouses. 

Eventually Hunger, Discord, Despair — those mighty 
magicians that have converted so many sieges into cap- 
itulations, so many heroes into cowards — prevailed ; 
and unhappy Malaga, led by Ali Dordux, an opulent 
merchant, came to terms. 

The Moorish inhabitants were ransomed individually 
at thirty golden doblas each, man, woman, and child. 
All their jewels and coin had to be surrendered to the 
government as part payment of the ransom, and the 
rest was to be paid in eight months ; even ransoms had 
to be paid for those who had died meantime. Slavery 
was the doom awaiting those unable to pay. The poli- 
tic Ferdinand took care that the majority of the cap- 
tives should not meet these stipulations, and some say 
that from eleven thousand to fifteen thousand of them 
became slaves and were scattered throughout Spain. 

A Catholic chronicler preserves to us the legend of 
the passionate lament of the people of Malaga over 
their lost city, their vanished liberty, and their profound 
desolation. 

" Oh Malaga, city so renowned and beautiful, where 
now is the strength of thy castle ? where the grandeur 
of thy towers ? Of what avail have been thy mighty 
walls for the protection of thy children ? Behold them 
driven from thy pleasant abodes, doomed to drag out a 
life of bondage in a foreign land, and to die far from 



Q-ranada Demanded. 303 

the home of their infancy ! What will become of thy 
old men and matrons, when their gray hairs shall be no 
longer reverenced ? What will become of thy maidens, 
so delicately reared and tenderly cherished, when re- 
duced to hard and menial servitude ? Behold thy once 
happy families scattered asunder, never again to be 
united ■ sons separated from their fathers, husbands 
from their wives, and tender children from their moth- 
ers ; they will bewail each other in foreign lands, but 
their lamentations will be the scoff of the stranger. Oh 
Malaga, city of our birth, who can behold thy desola- 
tion, and not shed tears of bitterness ? " 

Ferdinand at once proceeded against the remaining 
dominions of Abdallah El Zagal — dominions now a 
mere fragment of densely-populated sierra and sea- 
coast. This was in 1488. The populous cities of Baza, 
Guadix, and Almeria (an important sea-port), with 
numerous small towns which were sprinkled about these 
dominions, from the frontiers of Jaen, along the border 
of Murcia, to the Mediterranean, the Alpujarra range, 
and the perennial fountains of the Sierra Nevada soon 
fell. 

Boabdil was now reminded of a treaty which had 
been made between him and Ferdinand ; this treatv 
stipulated that in case the Catholic sovereigns should 
gain the cities of Guadix, Baza, and Almeria, Boabdil 
should surrender Granada, and accept in exchange sev- 
eral Moorish towns, to be held by him as vassal. Being 
called upon to fulfil his engagements Boabdil faltered, 
hesitated, temporized, and finally, by the influence of 
Muza Abul Gazan, a cavalier of royar lineage, great 
beauty, and chivalrous feeling, sent in a negative to Fer- 



304 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

dinarid's demand for the surrender of Granada. King 
Ferdinand then turned his hostilities against this city. 

Here then, amid the luxuriance and beauty of the 
vega of Granada, encircled by the silvery crests of the 
Sierra Nevada, overhung by the delightful groves and 
towers of the Alhambra, surrounded by the poetic asso- 
ciations and passionate souvenirs of the expiring Kha- 
lifate — here, in this second Damascus, this city of cun- 
ning artificers, dextrous horsemen, and graceful civiliza- 
tion — here where the Darro and the Xenil came down 
from the mountains of the myrtles, and, according to 
Moorish legend, ran grains of gold and silver as they 
united and meandered through the heavenly plain of 
Granada ; in this spot, sacred to stormy and tumultuous 
sensuality, to revolution, to Arabian poetry, to the Kha- 
lifs and sultanas, to religious fanaticism, tolerance, cul- 
ture, bloodshed, to every paradox in short, the Moors 
were to make their last stand and vanquish or die in 
the holy battle of the faith. 

Astonished and bewildered, the Moslems saw their 
empire departing from them by inches, until now, Gran- 
ada alone — Granada the incomparable — remained. 

Both sides made preparations for desperate measures. 
King Ferdinand, after a winter of preparation, took the 
held in April, with forty thousand foot, and ten thousand 
horse, resolved to sit down before Granada and never 
to quit its walls until the great banner of the cross 
waved from the mocking bastions of the Alhambra. 
Ponce de Leon, marquis of Cadiz, Alonzo de Aguilar, 
the master of Santiago, and the counts of Cabra, 
Urena, Cifuentes, and Tendilla, were among the valiant 
captains most conspicuous in this campaign. The 



The Siege of G-ranada. 305 

Moorish chivalry within the gates of the doomed city, 
swore eternal vengeance, constancy, and fidelity, and 
were led on by Muza, Nairn Reduan, Mohamed Aben- 
Zayde, Abdel Kerim Zegri, and the alcaydes of the Al- 
cazaba and the palace. A spirit of contempt, of flam- 
ing zeal, of exultant enthusiasm, of passionate despair, 
fired and animated the twenty thousand young men of 
the city. 

The beginning of the siege was more like a stately 
tournament ; and gallantry, rich armor, and skilfully 
manipulated steeds were the order of the day. Soon 
Ferdinand forbade the acceptance of individual chal- 
lenges, from the loss they occasioned, and with grim 
resolution went to work to build a fortified camp sup- 
plied with every necessary for a long-continued in- 
vestment. 

The gallant Hernan Perez del Pulgar succeeded in 
entering Granada and affixing a parchment containing 
4ve Maria in large letters to the door of the principal 
mosque. This was done in retaliation for the defiance 
of Tarfe the Moor, who, clashing through the Christian 
camp, hurled his lance, with a message for the queen 
attached, at the pavilion of the sovereigns. 

Charles V. perpetuated Pulgar's exploit by permitting 
him and his descendants to sit during high mass, in the 
choir of the church built on the spot, and assigned as 
burial place for Pulgar himself, the identical ground 
where he had kneeled to nail the sacred legend. 

The despairing valor of the Moors now shot up in 
one culminating blaze ; an impetuous sally toward the 
close was made by Muza and Boabdil, but was utterly 
frustrated by the enemy's overwhelming force, The 



306 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

Moors retired broken-hearted within their beautiful, 
blood-stained city, never more to come forth save to 
shame and degradation. " Their obstinate resistance," 
says Abarca, in his chronicles of the kings of Aragon, 
" shows the grief with which they yielded up the vega, 
which was to them a paradise and heaven. Exerting 
all the strength of their arms, they embraced, as it 
were, that most beloved soil, from which neither wounds, 
nor defeats, nor death itself, could part them. They 
stood firm, battling for it with the united force of love 
and grief, never drawing back the foot while they had 
hand to fight or fortune to befriend them." 

After a fire originating in the royal pavilion, which 
swept away an immense quantity of plate, jewels, costly 
stuffs, and armor, the wary Ferdinand resolved, as well 
to protect himself against a second contingency of the 
kind, as against the rigors of the approaching winter, 
to build a substantial camp ; so that it was said that 
where lately nothing but airy tents and fluttering drap- 
eries were seen, now rose as if by miracle, mighty 
towers, powerful walls, and solid edifices — ■ the cruci- 
form camp-city of Santa Fe, as it was christened by the. 
devout Isabella. 

Hopeless at the sight of such preparations, tortured 
by famine, faction, suffering, and the terror of death, 
the people of Granada capitulated on the 2nd of Jan- 
uary, 1492. Muza made his escape and mysteriously 
disappeared, never to be heard of again. 

That there should be unconditional liberation of all 
Christian captives ; that Boabdil and his cavaliers 
should do homage and swear fealty to the Castilian sov- 
ereigns ; that the Moors of Granada should become 




SEQUYiA: EHS ALCAZAR AND CATHEDRAL, 



The Capitulation. 309 

subjects of the crown, be protected in their religious 
observances, be governed by their own cadis, be ex- 
empted from tribute for three years, and then should 
pay the same they had been wont to pay to their own 
rulers ; that those so desiring should depart to Africa 
with their effect's and be given passage thither; such 
are the main outlines of the stipulations affecting the 
vanquished. 

Boabdil had estates provided in perpetuity for him 
and his descendants within and without Granada, to- 
gether with whatever had formed the royal patrimony 
before the surrender : and towns and lands in the Alpu- 
j arras were set aside as a sort of miniature sovereignty 
for him. He was to receive also on the day of sur- 
render, thirty thousand doblas of gold. 

The sad ceremonies of the capitulation took place in 
the presence of a countless multitude. Three minute 
guns thundered out the dying liberties of Morisma, and 
Boabdil, sallying forth from the Portal of the Seven 
Floors, delivered the keys of the city to Ferdinand in 
token of submission. "These keys,"' said he, "are the 
last relics of the Arabian empire in Spain ; thine, O 
king, are our trophies, our kingdom, and our person. 
Such is the will of God ! Receive them with the clem- 
ency thou hast promised, and which we look for at thy 
hands." 

Presenting the count of Tendilla, who was to be gov 
ernor of the city, with a costly ring, " With this ring,'' 
said he, " Granada has been governed ; take it and 
govern with it, and God make you more fortunate than 
me." 

When Boabdil, in his setting forth, reached an emi- 



310 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

nence which commanded the last view of Granada, and 
looking back saw the great crucifix sparkling in the 
sunbeams that gave a pathetic loveliness to the Alham- 
bra, it is said that, over-charged with grief, he could con- 
tain himself no longer, but bursting into tears, ex- 
claimed, " Allah Achbah ! God is great ! " " You do 
well," exclaimed the wrathful Ayxa, "to weep like a 
woman for what you failed to defend like a man." 

Down to late generations, the spot where the Moor 
turned back and beheld the illumined minarets of the 
Alhambra for the last time, was called " the Last Sigh 
of the Moor." 

THE FLIGHT FROM GRANADA. 

There was crying in Granada when the sun was going down ; 
Some calling on the Trinity, some calling on Mahoun. 
Here passed away the Koran there in the Cross was borne, — 
And here was heard the Christian bell, and there the Moorish 
horn ; 

Te Deiim Laudamus, was up the Alcala sung ; 

Down from the Alhambra's minarets were all the crescents flung ; 

The arms thereon of Aragon they with Castile's display ; 

One king comes in in triumph, — one weeping goes away. 

Thus cried the weeper, while his hands his old white beard did tear ; 

" Farewell, farewell, Granada! thou city without peer ! 

Woe, woe, thou pride of heathendom ! seven hundred years and 

more 
Have gone since first the faithful thy royal sceptre bore. 

" Thou wert the happy mother of a high renowned race : 
Within thee dwelt a haughty line, that now go from their place ; 
Within thee fearless knights did dwell, who fought with mickle 

glee, — 
The enemies of proud Castile, — the bane of Christentie ! 



The Flight from Granada. 311 

" The mother of fair dames wert thou, of truth and beauty rare, 
Into whose arms did courteous knights for solace sweet repair; 
For whose dear sakes the gallants of Afric made display 
Of might in joust and battle on many a bloody day. 

" Here gallants held it little thing for ladies' sake to die, 
Or for the prophet's honor, and pride of Soldanry; 
For here did valor flourish, and deeds of warlike might 
Ennobled lordly palaces in which was our delight. 
" The gardens of thy Vega, its fields and blooming bowers, — 
Woe, woe ! I see their beauty gone, and scattered all their flowers ! 
No reverence can he claim, — the king that such a land hath lost, — 
On charger never can he ride, nor be heard among the host ; 
But in some dark and dismal place, where none his face may see, 
There, weeping and lamenting, alone that King should be." 

Lockhart. 



CHAPTER XIV. 
REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. 

[CONTINUED.] 

WHILE, says an accomplished historian, the 
Spanish sovereigns were detained before 
Granada, they published their memorable and most 
disastrous edict against the Jews ; inscribing it, as it 
were, with the same pen that drew up the capitulation 
of Granada and the treaty with Columbus. 

Throughout the peninsula the Jews had attained an 
enviable degree of prosperity and wealth ; sufficient 
excuse for the action of the Inquisition. Though 
three of the queen's private secretaries, Alvarez, Avila, 
and Pulgar were converted Jews, the great mass of the 
Jewish subjects passionately adhered to the ancient 
ritual. This of itself was a scandal to Spanish Chris- 
tendom ; but now, since proselytism met with stubborn 
opposition on their part, the Jews were accused of kid- 
napping and circumcising Christian children or cruci- 
fying them on Good Friday in derision of Christ, 
while indiscriminate charges of poisoning were brought 
against the Jewish apothecaries and physicians, and 
conversion of Catholics to the Jewish rite was alleged. 
It was asserted by the inquisitors that the only method 
of extirpating- Israelitish practices absolutely, was expul- 

312 



Torquemada, the Inquisitor. 313 

sion of the race, allied though it might be by blood and 
marriage with some of the best stock of the realm ; and 
the immediate and final banishment of every unbaptized 
Israelite from the kingdom was insisted on. While 
certain prominent Jews were trying to propitiate the 
sovereigns, in their sore pecuniary distress, by offers of 
thirty thousand ducats towards defraying the expenses 
of the Moorish war, Torquemada, the grand inquisitor, 
burst into the palace of the sovereigns, and drawing 
forth a crucifix from beneath his mantle, held it up, 
exclaiming, " Judas Iscariot sold his master for thirty 
pieces of silver. Your Highnesses would sell him 
again for thirty thousand ; here he is ; take him and 
barter him away." Dashing the crucifix on the table, 
he rushed out of the apartment. The unparalleled im- 
pudence of this outburst had as its result the loss of 
the most skilful and ingenious portion of the popula- 
tion. The queen, overawed by the Dominican Torque- 
mada, and accustomed to almost total obedience in 
matters of faith, yielded, contrary to her own humane 
and noble instincts, to the fierce suggestions of her 
confessor. Torquemada triumphed, and the edict for 
the expulsion of the Jews was signed March 30, 1492. 

It is infinitely pathetic to read of the effect of this 
instrument in the homes of the exiled Israelites. Many 
of them, reared in elegance, highly educated, unaccus- 
tomed to privations of any sort, full of patriotism, loy- 
alty, and self-sacrifice, intimately associated with all the 
glories and all the humiliations of Spain, now branded 
with infamy, were cast out helpless and defenceless, 
forbidden even to take their gold and silver with them, 
compelled in some cases to exchange a house for an 



314 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

ass, and a vineyard for a suit of clothes, but pathetically 
constant and full of a sublime fortitude to the last. 

The highways were thronged with delicate women, 
gray-haired old men, and weeping children, on their way 
to unknown and inhospitable lands, perhaps to slavery 
and death ; eighty thousand passed into Portugal ; many 
wandered hopeless to Cadiz and Santa Maria, and took 
passage for Africa, where they were plundered or slain 
by the robbers of Barbary. Agonizing details of hunger, 
violation, and cruelty reach us from this time. Some 
managed to secrete a little money in their garments or 
saddles ; or, having been suspected of swallowing gold 
and silver coins, were ripped open with unspeakable 
torments and searched for the imagined wealth. Num- 
bers, unable to endure the sorrows and hardships of 
wandering, staggered back to the beloved fatherland 
and were forced to the indignity of baptism, and that 
in such multitudes, that they could not be individually 
baptized but had to submit to sprinkling with a mop or 
a hyssop-branch ; " thus," (forsooth) " renouncing their 
ancient heresies, they became faithful followers of the 
Cross." 

At Naples, great numbers of them were swept off by 
a malignant disease ; in Genoa, indescribable suffering 
accompanied those who had taken refuge there ; the 
Levant and Turkey were filled with them, and their 
descendants still cling to the Castilian as their home 
vernacular. England, France, and Holland harbored a 
multitude, and it is said that even to-day the Spanish is 
heard in some of the London synagogues. The whole 
number of exiles is computed to be between one hun- 
dred and sixty thousand and eight hundred thousand 




Prison of the Inquisition. — P age 210. 



Expulsion of the Jews. 317 

thousand ; the more cautious historians incline to the 
smaller estimate. 

The loss of the Jews, soon to be followed by that of 
the Moors, was irretrievable. The humiliation, ferocity, 
violation of all law and justice, and monstrous impiety 
involved in such a deed cannot be described in words ; 
and though the subject of lavish encomiums from en- 
lightened contemporaries and of exultation as a great 
victory of the cross, the expulsion of the Jews must 
ever leave a stain on the otherwise spotless memory of 
Isabella. 

The attempted assassination of Ferdinand while on a 
visit to Catalonia in 1492, after the conclusion of hos- 
tilities at Granada, spread general consternation through 
the country. 

While Isabella's genius devoted itself with serene 
and lucid intelligence to the interior administration and 
organization of Spain, Ferdinand's temper and ambi- 
tion signalized themselves by characteristic devotion to 
the foreign interests of the land. This leads us to an 
outline of the Italian wars. 

The great cause of these complications was the 
claim of Charles VIII. to the crown of Naples, which 
had been in the possession of the Aragonese family for 
more than half a century, and had been solemnly so 
recognized by repeated sanctions of pope and people. 
Charles's claim was derived originally from a bequest 
of Rene', count of Provence, who excluded his own 
grandson, the rightful heir of the house of Anjou, in 
favor of the French king. At the time a misunder- 
standing existed between Charles and Spain ; he was at 
war with Germany and England, and little benefit could 



318 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

be expected even if he succeeded in establishing his 
claim. But seeing the necessity of adopting a concilia- 
tory policy, he proceeded to make peace with Henry 
VII. of England at Etaples, with Maximilian, emperor 
of Germany, at Sesnli, and with Ferdinand at Barcelona, 
By the treaty with Ferdinand the provinces of Cerdagne 
and Roussillon, originally mortgaged by Ferdinand's 
father, Juan II., to Louis XI. of France, for three hun- 
dred thousand crowns, were restored. Louis was to 
furnish aid against Ferdinand's rebellious Catalonian 
subjects. 

Both sides, however, failed in their engagements. 
Ferdinand with the dogged perseverance characteristic 
of his spirit, pursued his determination to recover these 
fair provinces by fair means or by foul, by negotiation, 
bribery, or arms, if necessary. Louis's successor, 
Charles, fortunately being impatient to prosecute his 
designs for the expulsion of Ferdinand II., son of 
Alfonso, from Naples, yielded with all imaginable speed 
to the king of Spain's solicitations and representations, 
and a treaty was signed by Charles at Tours and by 
Ferdinand at Barcelona, January 19, 1493. The prin- 
cipal stipulations of this treaty, rendered of great im- 
portance by what followed, were : mutual aid in war 
between the contracting parties j each should prefer the 
other's alliance, the pope's excepted ; Spain should enter 
into no understanding with any power prejudicial to 
the interests of France, the pope excepted; Roussillon 
and Cerdagne should be restored to Aragon. But as 
doubts existed as to whom these provinces rightfully 
appertained, it was stipulated that arbitrators, named 
by the Spanish sovereigns, should be appointed, if re- 



Italian Wars. 319 

quested by Charles, with plenary powers to decide; 
and that both sides should abide by their decision. 

The approaching conflict between Charles and Al- 
fonso, successor of Ferdinand his father (1494), was 
highly interesting to Ferdinand, because he feared the 
formidable preparations of Charles would result in the 
subversion of the Neapolitan branch of his house, and 
the overthrow of his own dominions in Sicily. Charles, 
surrounded by the youthful chivalry of his court, appears 
to us, in the garrulous chronicles of Comines, as burning 
for an opportunity to distinguish himself. He crossed 
the Alps in August, 1494, overran the country with 
wonderful alacrity, treated friends and allies alike with 
the utmost perfidy, and in December victoriously 
entered the gates of Rome. 

Meanwhile Ferdinand, by means of his ambassador 
Alonzo de Silva had come to an explicit understanding 
with Charles, who, under pretext of a crusade against 
the Turks, had introduced this army into Italy where 
he intended to linger just long enough to make good 
his claims to Naples. Ferdinand, after some prelim- 
inary compliments and generalities, cautioned him 
against forming any designs against Naples, which was 
a feoff of the church, expressly excepted by the treaty 
of Barcelona which recognized the claims and authority 
of the church as paramount to every other obligation. 

The chagrin of Charles, at what he called the perfidy 
of the Spanish court, in so broadly interpreting the com- 
pact of Barcelona, is difficult to describe. He had 
hoped for Ferdinand's non-interference, or even for his 
co-operation in the conquest of Naples, and lie was 
greatly astounded that the rights of the church, perpet- 



320 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

ually disregarded and trampled under foot, should now 
be so scrupulously protected by the power beyond the 
Pyrenees. He contemptuously dismissed the Spanish 
envoy, and proceeded hurriedly to his Italian campaign. 
The admirable organization of the French infantry, its 
employment of battalions of Swiss mercenaries armed 
with huge pikes eighteen feet long, grouped in bristling 
and invulnerable masses called the hedgehog, its beauti- 
ful train of bronze ordnance, served with great skill 
and easily capable of demolishing the flimsy fortifica- 
tions of the time, soon spread panic among the heavy 
armed cavalry, the soldiers of fortune, and the light 
and dancing chivalry of Italy. Copper tubes, covered 
with wood and hides, were no match for the artillery of 
the French, and the Italian soldiery, who sometimes 
fought for hours without loss of a single life — riveted 
in plates of steel as they were, and rejoicing in a repose 
not allowed to be disturbed by the thunder of guns 
between sunset and sunrise — soon gave way before the 
French. 

Before coming to an open rupture with Charles, Fer- 
dinand, in January 1495, sent another embassy to 
remonstrate with him. Pope Alexander had meanwhile 
propitiated Ferdinand by granting him two-ninths of 
the tithes throughout the kingdom of Castile, by pro- 
mulgating bulls of crusade through Spain, granting 
one-tenth of the ecclesiastical revenues to be used in 
the protection of the Holy See, and, in 1494, conferring 
on the Spanish sovereigns, in imitation of the title 
" Most Christian " belonging to France, the title of 
Catholic, in recognition of their eminent virtues, their 
zeal in defence of the apostolic faith, their reformation 



The League of Venice. 321 

of conventual discipline, their subjugation of the 
Moors, and their purification of the kingdom from the 
pollution of the Jews. Ferdinand simultaneously, cog- 
nizant of the peril to his Sicilian dominions arising 
from the occupation of Naples by the French, sent a 
fleet over to the viceroy of Sicily and entrusted the land 
forces which were to co-operate with them to Gonsalvo 
de Cordova, well known as the Great Captain. 

Charles, instead of complying with the representa- 
tions of the new embassy to abandon his scandalous 
enterprise against a feoff of the pope, cried out that 
Ferdinand's conduct was perfidious, that he had delib- 
erately endeavored to circumvent him by introducing 
into the treaty the clause about the pope, and that it 
would be time enough to talk of the rights of Naples 
when he had possession of it. 

Charles made a solemn entry into Naples, in February, 
1495, jauntily assumed the title of King of Jerusalem 
and Sicily, and affected the state and authority of em- 
peror. Satisfied with this, and overcome like Hannibal 
by the effeminate pleasures of the sunny and voluptu- 
ous Campo Felice, he abandoned his Quixotic crusade 
against Constantinople and wasted his time in frivolous 
amusements. 

Alarmed at the progress of Charles, Austria, Rome, 
Milan, Venice, and Spain formed, in 1495, tne celebrated 
league of Venice — the first of the multifold coalitions 
and combinations for mutual defence in Europe — 
whose design was to break and overthrow the power of 
the now frightened " king of Jerusalem." 

We have thus briefly indicated the causes of this war, 
but it will be impossible for us to follow its incidents in 



322 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

detail. The licentiousness and indolence of Charles 
disgusted his people, alienated his allies, and helped his 
enemies ; he plundered Naples of her precious antiques, 
sculptured marble and alabaster, curiously wrought gates 
of bronze, and rare architectural ornaments ; he utterly 
failed in his absurd assumption of universal sovereignty 
at his pretended coronation in Naples, May 12th ; he 
recrossed the mountains in October, 1495 ; and his 
memorable expedition, crowned at first by complete 
success, left no permanent result except a legacy of 
disastrous and interminable wars. Gilbert de Bourbon, 
Due de Montpensier, old Brantome's "grand chevalier 
sans reproche," was left behind as viceroy of Naples, 
— no peer of the illustrious Gonsalvo de Cordova, com- 
mander-in-chief of the Spanish forces. 

Born at Montilla in 1453, Gonsalvo de Cordova grew 
up in the tumult of the Moorish and insurrectionary 
wars. The polish and distinction of his manners, the 
beauty of his brilliant countenance and chestnut hair, 
the magnificence of his dress and style, his matchless 
gallantry, the splendor and ostentatiousness of his 
armor — his proficiency in every knightly accomplish- 
ment winning for him the name of "El principe de Ios 
caballeros," the "prince of cavaliers" — the long line of 
his eminent and distinguished services in the Portu- 
guese and Granada wars, his chivalrous regard for 
women, his prudence, dexterity, and fertility of resource, 
all recommended him to Isabella not only as an unsur- 
passed social favorite and politician, but as the person 
best fitted to command the Italian army. He was 
accordingly invested with the command of the land 
forces, and arrived at Messina in May, 1495. 



Peace with France. 323 

The glory of having in twelve months, with the most 
limited resources, defeated the bravest and best disci- 
plined army in Europe, commanded by Montpensier 
and d' Aubigny, won for Gonsalvo, when he had reached 
Atella in his march of conquest, the title of the Great 
Captain. An honorable and glorious reception awaited 
him when, after succoring the pope by expelling the 
French from Ostia, he was complimented by the desig- 
nation of " Deliverer of Rome," presented with the 
golden rose, and, on passing over into Spain, in 1498, 
sumptuously entertained and welcomed by his sov- 
ereigns. Frederic II. — the sixth king who during the 
three years previous had occupied the disastrous throne 
of Naples — ■ endowed him with the title of Duke of St. 
Angelo and an estate containing three thousand vassals. 
Peace with France, after some hostilities in Roussillon, 
ensued after the luckless issue of the Calabrian cam- 
paigns, so well manoeuvred and consummated by Gon- 
salvo. The treaty was signed, after the death of 
Charles VIII., at Marcoussis, in August, 1498. 

The vigor, sagacity, and subtle diplomatic gifts of the 
Spanish king in the conduct of this war, his devout 
attitude throughout the hostilities as a champion of the 
church, and his promptness in meeting extraordinary 
emergencies, gained him a European reputation ; while 
the educational advantages of the campaign to the 
Spanish soldiers, their dwelling for so long in a new 
world, their acquisition of useful lessons in tactics, the 
more thorough organization of a disciplined militia, 
resulting from observation of, and contact with, foreign 
powers, cannot be overestimated. 

Ferdinand and Isabella had five children ; one son, 
Juan, (June 30, 1478) and four daughters — Isabel 



324 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella, 

(1470), Juana (1479), Maria (1482), and Catharine 
(1485). None of them were distinguished by the keen 
intellect of their mother, but all were carefully educated 
and made powerful alliances. Prince Juan married 
Margaret, daughter of the Emperor Maximilian ; and 
Maximilian's son, the archduke Philip, sovereign of 
the Low Countries in his mother's right, married Juana 
(Crazy Jane), second daughter of Ferdinand and Isa- 
bella — alliances, opening the way to vast vistas and 
changes in European diplomacy and geography. Dona 
Catalina became conspicuous in English history by her 
marriage with Arthur, prince of Wales, and afterwards 
with his brother Henry VIII. Isabella, princess of the 
Asturias, married first Alfonso, the heir of Portugal, 
and, on his death, the noble and enlightened Emanuel, 
king of Portugal, on whom the crown had devolved at 
the death of king Joa in 1495. By the untimely death 
of Prince Juan without heirs, in 1497, — a young prince 
of exalted character and intelligence, — the succession 
devolved on Isabella of Portugal, who, before anything 
had been definitely determined concerning her succes- 
sion to the united monarchies, died in 1498, leaving 
one son, Miguel. 

Miguel, however, died in his second year, when the 
succession devolved on " Crazy Jane " and her heirs. 

At this moment two brilliant figures meet us in the 
thick of Spanish history ; one distinguished by consum- 
mate talents for business, by charming address, by great 
and lofty views, by pomp, and munificence, by propen- 
sities to gallantry, and by encouragement liberally given 
to learning and learned men ; the other, austere, ascetic, 
contemplative, ingenious in the rigor of his fastings, 
prayers, and self*torment, living on the green herbs and 



Twm Brilliant Figures. 327 

running waters, exalted by self-mortification till he fancied 
himself in communication with celestial intelligences, — 
haggard, thin, commanding — a bitter-tongued monk, 
versed in the fathers, and yet carrying beneath his mar- 
ble exterior a blazing coal of passionate and unsus- 
pected ambition. Mendoza, the "Grand Cardinal" 
and " third king of Spain" as he was called, formed a 
complete contrast to Ximenes. The sunlight, the joy- 
ousness, the spacious and genial nature of the one was 
thrown into luminous relief by the shadowy spirituality, 
the lovelessness, the misanthropic isolation of the other. 
Mendoza, archbishop of Toledo and primate of Spain, 
had supreme control in the cabinet for twenty years, 
and returned the confidence of his sovereigns by a 
course thoroughly in harmony with their own. By his 
death in 1495, the see became vacant and was pre- 
sented to Francisco Ximenes cle Cisneros, a Franciscan 
monk of low birth, the queen's confessor, recommended 
to her by the dying cardinal for his rare combination of 
talent and virtue. 

At first, Ximenes peremptorily refused the dignity ; 
he was devoted to meditation, to the practices of 
humility and piety,- to a sequestered life far from the 
vanities and vexations of the world ; and moreover, 
being nearly sixty years of age, he could hardly be 
charged with hypocrisy and affectation in shunning the 
commanding responsibilities of so exalted a station. 
He yielded at length, though after a resistance of six 
months, solely to the bull of the pope, who insisted 
upon his no longer declining an appointment which the 
church had sanctioned. He was thus almost literally 
dragged from the rigors of the monastery to the prim- 



328 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

acy of most Catholic Spain, while retaining to the last 
his simple and austere manners, his large charities, his 
domestic economy, his abstemious diet, and the coarse 
frock of St. Francis under the costly silks and furs of 
the archbishop's robes. Schemes of reform among the 
monastic orders, in defiance of the clamors and outcries 
of his enemies, were effected by him in conjunction 
with the apostolic nuncio. Searching examination was 
made into the conduct and morals of religious institu- 
tions of every sort ; the sloth and sensuality of the lower 
clergy were rigorously punished ; and purity, chastity, 
and self-restraint, long unknown, became once more no 
extraordinary virtues among the ministers of religion. 



CHAPTER XV. 

REIGN OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA. 
[continued.] 

BUT dazzling as were the sombre gifts of Ximenes, 
glowing as he was with holy fervor for the church, 
inflexible to the point of enduring in his youth years of 
imprisonment rather than sacrifice what he thought the 
right, he signally lacked tact, toleration, and ordinary 
human charity. This he showed in his persecution of 
the unfortunate Moors of Granada. 

At first, treated strictly within the letter of the terms 
of capitulation, the Granada Moors rejoiced in the con- 
ciliatory policy, the kindly temper, and the benevolent 
measures of the sovereigns and the Christian archbishop 
of Granada. Dissimilar as they were in habits, institu- 
tions, language, and religion to their conquerors, they 
could not at once abandon their most sacred associa- 
tions for a lying conformity with Catholicism ; but the 
eloquence, bounty, and goodness of the archbishop, 
self-interest, and the necessity of living, brought hun- 
dreds within the pale of the church. All might have 
gone well, had not Ximenes, impatient at the obduracy 
and infidelity of some of the prominent Moors, added 
terror, imprisonment, torture, and the auto tie fe as 

329 



330 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

further stimulants to a happy and multitudinous con- 
version. 

Reserving three hundred works devoted to medical 
science for his contemplated university library at Alcala 
he caused thousands of exquisitely executed Arabic 
manuscripts, connected with theology and scientific sub- 
jects, to be burned in one of the great squares of the 
city. He exhausted the hitherto marvellous patience of 
the Moors by his oppressions : a rebellion broke out in 
the Albaycin — the Moorish, now the Gypsy quarter of 
Granada — Ximenes was besieged in his palace, barely 
escaping the populace ; but the tumult was finally stilled 
by the personal influence and popularity of Talavera, 
archbishop of Granada. Xime'nes rushed to court, re- 
capitulated what had happened, and prevailed on Ferdi- 
nand and Isabella to send commissioners to Granada to 
investigate the late disturbances. As a result, fifty 
thousand persons were miraculously " converted," and 
kept the fires of the Inquisition lighted for a hundred 
years ; and soon, abjuring their ancient superstition and 
receiving baptism, they lost their names of Moors and 
came gradually to be denominated Moriscoes. Thus 
" Ximenes had achieved greater triumphs than even 
Ferdinand and Isabella, since they had conquered only 
the soil, while he had gained the souls of Granada." 

This strain of exultation, indulged in by the good 
archbishop Talavera, was soon exchanged for one of 
lamentation. The wild regions of the Alpujarras — a 
multitudinous system of sierras, filled with a fierce and 
unregenerate Moorish population, — had escaped the 
baptismal hyssop of Xime'nes, and beheld with indigna- 
tion the faithless conduct pursued toward their com- 




AN ANDALUblAN BULtKU AND HER MOTHER, 



Cardinal Ximenes. 



333 



patriots below, they seized the fortresses in the moun- 
tains, regarded with contempt the apostasy of Granada, 
and began their work of extermination on the Christian 
territories adjacent. Gonsalvo de Cordova and the 
count of Tendilla undertook to bring " God's enemies " 
to terms. Alonzo de Aguilar, eldest brother of Gon- 
salvo de Cordova, was sent to the neighborhood of 
Ronda, the centre of this savage insurrection ; and here 




< AKDIXAI, XlMENES. 



took place the appalling defeat and death of Alonzo 
and the famous engineer Ramirez de Madrid, rendered 
ever memorable by the exquisite ballad, — 



Rio Verde, Rio Verde, 
Tinto va en sangre viva. 



334 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

The dismal news of the defeat made an incredible 
sensation. Measures of great vigor were instantly taken 
to crush the accursed infidel and no great time passed 
before, seeing the hopelessness of their cause, the 
Moriscoes sent in deputies deprecating the king's anger 
and suing for pardon. Conversion or banishment was 
the answer. 

The story of the Rio Verde — infinitely sad and 
tragical as it was — lingered for ages in the memories 
of the Spaniards, and gave birth to a group of tender 
commemorative ballads unsurpassed for their sweet and 
musical melancholy. And well has it been said that 
the embalming touch of this beautiful minstrelsy has 
made the sombre episode more enduring than the 
most elaborate chronicles of carefully compiled history. 

Fernando, king of Aragon, before Granada lies, 
With dukes and barons many a one, and champions of emprize ; 
With all the captains of Castile that serve his lady's crown, 
He drives Boabdil from his gates, and plucks the crescent down. 

The cross is reared upon the towers for our Redeemer's sake ; 
The king assembles all his powers, his triumph to partake, 
Yet at the royal banquet there's trouble in his eye — 
" Now speak thy wish, it shall be done, great king," the lordlings 
cry. 

Then spake Fernando, " Hear, grandees ! which of ye all will go, 

And give my banner in the breeze of Alpuxar to blow ? 

Those heights along, the Moors are strong; now who, by dawn of 

day, 
Will plant the cross their cliffs among, and drive the dogs 

away ? " — 
Then champion on champion high, and count on count doth look ; 
And faltering is the tongue of lord, and pale the cheek of duke ; 
Till starts up brave Alonzo, the knight of Aguilar, 
The lowrnost at the royal board, but foremost still in war. 



Alonzo, the Knight of Aguilar. 335 

And thus he speaks: "I pray, my lord, that none but I may go ; 
For I made promise to the Queen, your consort, long ago, 
That ere the \Var should have an end, I, for her royal charms, 
And for my duty to her grace, would show some feat of arms." — 

Much joyed the king these words to hear — he bids Alonzo 

speed — 
And long before their revel 's o'er, the knight is on his steed; 
Alonzo's on his milk-white steed, with horsemen in his train — 
A thousand horse, a chosen band, ere dawn the hills to gain. 

They ride along the darkling ways, they gallop at the night; 
They reach Nevado ere the cock hath harbingered the light, 
But ere they've climbed that steep ravine, the east is glowing red, 
And the Moors their lances bright have seen, and Christian ban- 
ners spread. 

Beyond the sands, between the rocks, where the old cork trees 

grow, 
The path is rough, and mounted men must singly march and slow ; 
There o'er the path the heathen range their ambuscado's line, 
High up they wait for Aguilar, as the day begins to shine. 

There nought avails the eagle-eye, the guardian of Castile, 
The eye of wisdom, nor the heart that fear might never feel, 
The arm of strength that wielded well the strong mace in the fray, 
Nor the broad plate, from whence the edge of falchion glanced 
away. 

Not knightly valor there avails, nor skill of horse and spear, 

For rock on rock comes tumbling down from cliff and cavern 
drear ; 

Down — down like driving hail they come, and horse and horse- 
men die 

Like cattle, whose despair is dumb when the fierce lightnings fly. 

Alonzo, with a handful more, escapes into the field, 
There like a lion stands at bay, in vain besought to yield ; 
A thousand foes around are seen, but none draws near to fight ; 
Afar with bolt and javelin they pierce the steadfast knight. 



336 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

A hundred and a hundred darts are hissing round his head ; 
Had Aguilar a thousand hearts, their blood had all been shed ; 
Faint and more faint he staggers, upon the slippery sod, 
At last his back is to the earth, he gives his soul to God. 

With that the Moors plucked up their hearts to gaze upon his face. 
And caitiff's mangled where he la}- the scourge of Afric's race ; 
To woody Oxijera then the gallant corpse they drew, 
And there upon the village-green they laid him out to view. 

Upon the village-green he lay as the moon was shining clear, 
And all the village damsels to look on him drew near; 
They stood around him all a-gaze, beside the big oak tree 
And much his beauty they did praise, though mangled sore was lie. 

Xow, so it fell, a Christian dame that knew Alonzo well, 
Not far from Oxijera did as a captive dwell, 
And hearing all the marvels, across the woods came she. 
To look upon this Christian corpse, and wash it decentlv. 

She looked upon him, and she knew the face of Aguilar, 
Although his beauty was disgraced with many a ghastly scar; 
She knew him, and she cursed the dogs that pierced him from afar, 
And mangled him when he was slain — the Moors of Alpuxar. 

The Moorish maidens, while she spake, around her silence kept, 
But her master dragged the dame away —then loud and long thev 

wept ; 
They washed the blood, with many a tear, from dint of dart and 

arrow, 
And buried him near the waters clear of the brook of Alpuxarra. 

After this brief and furious storm, profound tran- 
quillity visited the length and breadth of the kingdom 
of Granada. An edict was published in 1501, which 
prohibited intercourse between obdurate Mahometans 
and the orthodox (?) kingdom of Granada, followed by 
another in 1502, closely modelled after that against the 




THE GENERALIFE. (GRANADA.) 



Italian Wars. 339 

Jews, baptizing or banishing all Moors twelve and four- 
teen years of age. Penalties of death and confiscation 
were affixed if any carried gold or silver out of the 
country or emigrated to the dominions of the Grand 
Turk or to hostile parts of Africa. 

Thus a dominion eight hundred years old was over- 
thrown in twenty years. 

At this point in our narrative we are again confronted 
with the Italian wars which, far from being put to ever- 
lasting sleep as they deserved to be, by the death of 
Charles VIII., broke out afresh on the accession of his 
successor, Louis XII. 

In November, 1500, took place the equal partition of 
the kingdom of Naples between France and Spain. 
Frederic II. was excluded as having called in the assis- 
tance of the Turks, bitter enemies of Christianity. 
Apulia and Calabria in the south, fell to Spain ; Lavoro 
and Abruzzo in the north, fell to France. 

Ferdinand tried to justify his part of this astounding 
proceeding by laying emphasis on the illegitimacy of 
the branch of the Aragonese house to whom Alfonso, 
his uncle, had left the kingdom, and the necessity of 
bringing these important possessions again within the 
control of the legitimate branch. Kept rigidly secret 
for a while, the terms of the treaty became known to 
Alexander VI. as soon as the Sire d'Aubigny crossed 
the papal borders at the head of the French army. He 
confirmed the partition, and in July the French entered 
the Neapolitan frontier. 

It was soon seen, however, that the pretensions of the 
two parties to the partition were irreconcilable. The 



340 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

central portion, between the southern and northern por- 
tions, embracing the Capitanate, the Basilicate, and 
Principality, formed a debatable ground not mentioned 
in the treaty, which soon brought both kings to an open 
rupture. The French began hostilities, and soon the 
war raged unequivocally on both sides. 

Gonsalvo triumphed. D'Aubigny, with the wreck of 
his forces surrendered ; Naples was entered with pomp 
by die great captain, May 14, 1503 ; and every consid- 
erable place in the kingdom except Gaeta tendered its 
submission. 

During the progress of the war Charles V., son of 
Philip I. of the Netherlands and Juana, daughter of 
Ferdinand and Isabella, was born in Ghent, February 
24, 1500 — an event of moment, as, by the death of 
Prince Miguel, Charles was now heir of the united 
monarchies of Castile, Aragon, Sicily, Naples, and the 
Netherlands, and on the death of his father, Philip the 
Handsome, he was to become emperor of Germany. 
Philip I. abhorred the punctilious Spaniards and shortly 
after the ceremony of his son's recognition by the 
Cortes, the archduke, despite the critical condition of 
his queen, whom he intended to leave in Spain, an- 
nounced his intention of an immediate return to the 
Netherlands, which he carried out by traversing France. 

At this point, Juana, approaching the period of the 
birth of her second son, Ferdinand (March 10, 1503), 
began to show symptoms of the eccentricity which 
afterwards developed into the most fantastic aberration. 
Despondency at the absence of the gay and sparkling 
Philip, seized her, and she refused to be comforted. 
Insanity was hereditary in the family : it had tainted 



< 'ontrasted Civilization. 341 

the intellect of Isabella's mother, it took the form of 
religious enthusiasm in several of Isabella's daughters, 
it sent Charles, her grandson, to the cloister, made a 
gloom\' bigot of his son, Philip II., and probably urged 
the wretched Don Carlos, son of Philip, to an igno- 
minious death. ' 

The French invasion of Spain by way of Roussillon 
in 1503, proved utterly futile. 

Here the philosophic historian pauses to recount the 
strange contrast presented by the civilization of Italy 
and the utter wretchedness contemporary with it. The 
golden age of Italian literature, architecture, and art 
was at hand ; Florence, Venice, and Rome were the 
busy scene of an intellectual and aesthetic activity 
which threw its conceptions into the most sumptuous 
forms. Palaces, paintings, poems innumerable, came 
flowing in a rich stream from the fingers of artist, archi- 
tect, and poet. Luxurious refinement pervaded the 
upper classes of society. The revival of classical 
learning after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, 
spread a general and eloquent enthusiasm for the mas- 
terpieces of Greek art and Roman antiquity. A splen- 
did assemblage of genius graced the petty courts of 
Italy. At a period nearly contemporary with this. 
Ariosto was singing his immortal song ; Rafaelle was 
blazoning the walls of the Vatican with incomparable 
frescoes ; Michael Angelo was rearing his mighty dome ; 
Leonardo with exhaustless versatility was scattering his 
powers over the varied fields of music, engineering, 
painting, and geology ; and Machiavelli began to pub- 
lish, through his Prince, those subtle and insidious po- 
litical maxims which became incarnate in the princes of 



342 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 



his native land and totally excluded politics from the 
range of the the moral sciences. 

With all this beauteous outburst of human genius 
and intelligence was associated, as in dismal and endless 
undertone, the ghastly threnody of the Italian wars. 
Pitiless fury, debased patriotic sentiment, cruelty not to 
be described, a bestialized papacy, butchery, bloodshed, 
and the upas-shadow of the Inquisition, distinguished 




ISABELLA DICTATING HER WILL. 

these fantastic times equally with exquisite culture, lovo 
of art, and consummate civilization. 

The success of the Spaniards in Italy (1504) was due 
to the innovations in their arms introduced by Gonsalvo, 
the obedience and subordination of the soldiery, and 
the invincible energy of the great captain himself. 
With an absurdly small force he annihilated the gener- 



Death of Isabella. 343 

als and armies of France, conquered the kingdom of 
Naples, and educated his troops to a system of tactics 
and military mining — brought by him to unprece- 
dented perfection in the course of the war — which after- 
wards made the Spanish troops the finest in Europe. 

On November 26, 1504, died the ever-glorious and 
memorable Isabella I., in the fifty-fourth year of her 
age, and thirtieth of her reign. To say that she was 
loved and lamented by her people, would be hardly 
describing the adoration they paid her — their mother, 
their friend, their queen, their protector. Universal 
homage was paid to her virtues. Her grace, tact, and 
courage, the sweetness and symmetry of her features, her 
abstemiousness, piety, and abhorrence of ostentation : 
her bigotry, excused and softened by the tenor of the 
times, her unbending principle, hatred of duplicity, prac- 
tical good sense, and tender sensibility; her distaste 
for extravagance in dress, her skilful selection of agents 
to accomplish her plans, her contempt of physical pain 
and fatigue, and her benevolence, first among the sov- 
ereigns of Europe to institute camp hospitals for the 
help of her poor sick soldiers ; the remembrance of all 
this threw a halo around her memory. 

By her will, executed October 12, 1504, she left the 
crown of Castile to the Infanta Juana as "queen pro- 
prietor," and the archduke Philip, her husband. In the 
absence or incapacity, of Juana, Ferdinand was ap- 
pointed sole regent of Castile until the majority of her 
grandson, Charles. The king and Ximenes were the 
chief executors. She left also specific directions as to 
the codification of the laws, injunctions characterized 
by the utmost tenderness concerning the conversion, 



344 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

civilizing, and gentle treatment of the Indians of the 
New World, and commands that the sources of the 
crown income derived from the Alcavalas should be 
investigated and put upon a pure and correct basis. 

Ferdinand having resigned the crown of Castile, 
which he had so successfully held for thirty years, as- 
sumed the title of administrator or governor of Castile. 
The cones and grandees acknowledged Juana as queen 
and lady proprietor; but in consideration of her 
mental state, tendered their homage to Ferdinand in 
her name, as the lawful governor of the realm. A 
season of uneasiness and perplexity ensued, owing to 
the pretensions of Philip, who wrote requiring his father- 
in-law, to resign the government at once, and retire to 
Aragon. Philip attempted to tamper with Gonsalvo de 
Cordova in the endeavor to secure Naples. Ferdinand, 
at his wit's end owing to his growing unpopularity and 
the discontent of the grandees, who had always looked 
upon him as an alien and interloper, resolved to seek the 
alliance of France by a marriage with Germaine, niece 
of Louis XII., which was confirmed by the disgraceful 
treaty of Blois in 1505. If he had male issue, Aragon 
and its dependencies must be totally severed from Castile. 
If he did not, he was to share the splendid Italian con- 
quests with his unsuccessful competitor in these con- 
quests. An arrangement so incompatible with the 
customary sagacity of the Catholic king roused the 
ridicule and astonishment of Europe. 

By the concord of Salamanca in November, 1505, 
made between Philip and Ferdinand, Castile was to be 
governed jointly by Ferdinand, Philip, and Juana — an 
arrangement intended by Philip to lull the suspicions 



Marriage of TPerdinand and G-ermaine. 345 

of his father-in-law until he could effect a landing in 
Spain, when he meant to take matters into his own 
hands. 

In 1506, Ferdinand married the volatile Germaine, and 
in the same year Philip and Juan a arrived at Coruria, 
after their embarkation from the Netherlands. The 
personal beauty, generosity, and openness of disposi- 
tion peculiar to the archduke, soon won for him a num- 
erous and powerful following. Though Ferdinand re- 
ceived him courteously, he soon saw the hopelessness 
of a conflict with so general a favorite, and on the 27th 
of June, resigned the entire sovereignty of Castile to 
Philip and Juana, reserving to himself only the grand- 
masterships of the military orders and the revenues left 
him by Isabella's testament. With monstrous dissimu- 
lation he protested in private that this concession was 
wrung from him by force, and that he should take the 
first opportunity in spite of his solemn oath, of recov- 
ering his imagined possessions and releasing his daugh- 
ter from what he called her captivity. 

Between 1504 and 1506 occurred the last voyage, 
illness, and death of the illustrious Columbus. 

Philip, after a short and inglorious reign, character- 
ized by reckless extravagance, gross favoritism toward 
his Flemish courtiers, and arbitrary government, died 
suddenly in 1506 while Ferdinand was on his way to 
Naples. In 1507 Ferdinand returned to Spain and was 
greeted with universal satisfaction ; and as the condi- 
tion of Juana — wild, haggard, emaciated, and squalid 
as she was, refusing peremptorily ever to sign a state- 
paper and, lingering, in the end, for forty-seven years, 
without ever quitting her palace at Tordesillas — seemed 



346 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

so desperate, Ferdinand began to exercise an authority 
nearly as undisputed as, and far less clearly defined 
than, during the life-time of his noble consort. " Crazy 
Jane," as she was now called, remained plunged in pro- 
found melancholy ; she would not let the remains of 
Philip be buried ; she journeyed by night, saying " that 
a widow, who had lost the sun of her own soul, should 
never expose herself to the light of day;" she had con- 
tinual funeral ceremonies performed wherever she 
halted ; and jealously excluded every female from even 
approaching the perambulating corpse. Her grotesque 
horror, on once discovering that Philip's remains had 
been deposited in a nunnery, is more easily conceived 
than pictured in words. Gleams of intelligence visited 
her every now and then, nor does she seem by any means 
to have been so absolutely incapable as is usually said. 
Ximenes, who had lately received a cardinal's hat 
from Julius II. and had succeeded Deza as inquisitor- 
general of Castile, now conceived a bold and extraor- 
dinary enterprise. This was no less than the capture 
of the opulent city of Oran, on the African coast — an 
enterprise led, equipped, and achieved by himself per- 
sonally out of his own revenues as primate of Spain. 
This was in 1509. His genius overcame the almost in- 
superable obstacles put in his way by the jealousy of 
the nobles, the coolness of the king, and the magnitude 
of the preparations necessary to equip his ten thousand 
foot, four thousand horse, and eighty galleys ; while " a 
monk fighting the battles of Spain, whereas the great 
captain was left to stay at home, and count his beads 
like a hermit," gave rise to sneers. The troops, how- 
ever, after an impassioned harangue from the primate, 



J '^lSiSSiMiS^Si^ l ' 




GATE OF THE SALA DE JUSTICIA. (ALHAMBRA.) 



Cardinal Ximenes. 349 

rushed to victory, shouting " Santiago and Ximenes,"' 
while superstition said that the stupendous miracle of 
Joshua staying the sun in its course, was repeated for 
the venerable archbishop. 

Perhaps the illustrious prelate's chief claim to recog- 
nition, however, lies in his founding the university of 
Alcala and his Polyglot translation of the bible. The 
university was founded with solemn ceremonies in 1500 
and grew up a beautiful mass of picturesque and ele- 
gant architecture, furnished completely with everything 
requisite for the comfort and accommodation of a vast 
number of students. The famous Complutensian Poly- 
glot, entrusted to nine scholars renowned for skill and 
erudition in the ancient tongues, was fifteen years exe- 
cuting, being finished in 15 17, after great difficulties in 
printing, and by the aid of artists imported from Ger- 
many. Nearly four centuries after it was found that 
the precious manuscripts used in the translation had all 
been disposed of to a rocket-maker of Alcala who soon 
used them up as waste paper, 

On October 4, 15 11, the Holy League was formed 
between Ferdinand, Julius II. and Venice (afterwards 
joined by Henry VIII. of England) with the object of 
driving the French out of Italy. In this the Spaniards 
were again victorious. In 15 12, Navarre, which, allied 
with France, had refused the passage of some English 
troops coming to co-operate with Ferdinand in his de- 
scent on Guienne, was reduced to submission by the 
duke of Alva, grandfather of him of the Netherlands. 
Jean d'Albret, its letters-loving and amiable sovereign, 
took refuge in France. A truce in 15 13, put an end to 
the wars in the territories west of the Alps, for two 



850 Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. 

years, during which Navarre, by solemn act of cortes 
was incorporated (15 15), with the kingdom of Castile, 
rather than with the more intimately connected and 
contiguous Aragon. Whether regarded as an unblushing- 
usurpation, a measure of expediency, or as the restor- 
ation of its ancient historical union with Castile, the 
conquest of Navarre, with the general levelling of its 
fortresses and fortified places ended forever the exis- 
tence of an independent and aggressive monarchy in 
the heart of the great political net-work of Spain. 

The "Gran Capitan," now distrusted by Ferdinand, 
became morbid, irritable, and melancholy, and finally, 
consumed by iruvard fever and infirmities, breathed his 
last at his palace in Granada, December, 15 15. 

On the morning of January 23, 1516, Ferdinand him- 
self, yielding to a distressing heart disease, died in a 
small house belonging to the friars of Guadaloupe. "In 
so wretched a tenement did this lord of so many lands 
close his eyes upon the world ! " exclaimed the pious 
Peter Martyr. 

By his will he settled the succession of Aragon and 
Naples on Juana and her heirs. Ximenes was entrusted 
with the administration of Castile during Charles's ab- 
sence in the Netherlands, and Aragon to the king's nat- 
ural son, the archbishop of Saragossa. 

He had reigned forty-one years over Castile, and 
thirty-seven over Aragon, and died in his sixty-fourth 
year. His body, at first laid beside Isabella's in the 
monastery of the Alhambra, was removed with hers the 
next year, to the Cathedral church of Granada, where 
Charles V. afterward erected the mausoleum of exqui- 
sitely carved marble still visible to-day. 



k 



CAS/TILE 



(*) Rival of Richard of Cornwall as nominal Emperor. 
(t; Unsuccessful competitor for trie throne against Sancho IV. 
(I) Through this marriage Spain was united into one mon- 
archy. 



FERDINAND I, second s 



SANCHO II, 1065-1072, 



a of Sancho the Grfeat 
, oh. s. p. 1 



, heiress of Leon. 



ALFONSO VI. Leon. 1065-1109; =j=jJonstance, dau. of Robert, 
Castile 1072. ] D. of Burgundy. 



Theresa — Henry, grandson of Robert, URRACA, 1109-1126. (1) = Raimond, son of William, C. of 

D. of Burgundy. (2) _ ALFONSO I. of Aragon, VII. o 



i ** 

A, 1109-112 



of Castile and Leon. 



)NSO IX. 



Sancia — Sancho VI. of Navarre. 
-1214. j Eleanor, dau. of Henry II. of England. 



Constance — Louis VII. of France. 



Ferdinand II. = Urraca, dau. of 
1157-1188. | Alfonso I 

of Portugal. 



Urraca = Garcia IV. of Navarro 



Alfonso II. of Portugal = 4. Urraca. 



2. HENRY] 
1214-1217, ob. s 



3. Blanche — Louis VIII. of Franc 



Eleanor = (1) James I. of Aragon. 



Sancia = (2) Alfonso II. of Aragon. 



Berengaria— (2) ALFONSO IX. 1188-1230. (1)= Theresa, dau. of Sancho I. of Portugal. 



Berengaria (Mary) — (2) John de Brienne, Eastern Emp. 



ALFONSO X*. 1252-1284. = Iolande, dau. of James I. of Aragon. 



SANCHO IV., 1284-1295. 



Eleanor — Edward I. of England. 
Beatrix = Alfonso III. of Portugal. 



2. Alfonso, t 



ID IV., 



(Denis of Portugal.) 



1295-1312. —Consi 






Ld.ofVillena. 
Joanna -f HENRY II. of Trastamare, 1368-1379. 



Alfonso IV. = Beatrix. 
ALFONSO XL, 1312-1350. — Mary. 

PETER the Cruel, 1330-1368. — Blanche, dau. of Peter I. of Bourbon 
(Edward III. of England.) 



Eleanor — CharWs in. of Navarre. 



Constance — John of Gaunt. 



Edmund, Duke of York. — Isabella. 



2. Ferdinand, K. of Aragon and Sicily. 



John II. of Aragon 



Mary — (1) JOHN II., 1406-1454. (2) = Isabella of Portugal. 



Ferdinand, ob. 1516+ =2. Isabella, 1474-1504. 



:.. Alfonso, ob. 1468. 



(Emp. Maximilian I.) 



PHILIP, ob. 1506. T 3. JOANNA, ob. 1555. 
CHARLES I. of Spain, Emp. Charles V. 



Alfonso, P. of Portugal. —(1)1. Isabella ob. 1498 (2) j(l) Emanuel of Portugal. (2) - 4. Mary. 
Emanuel, ob. s. p 1500. 



10* 



Matild 

Alf 

of P 



.Eleanc 
of C 



M 

2. 



Sanci 
ob. s. 
1324. 



ARAGON. 



Including Aragonese Princes in Provence, Majorca, and Sicily. 



Barcelona. 
Raimond Berenger II. —Matilda, dau. of 
Ob. 1082. Robert (luiscard. 



, Queen of Castile. 



PETRONILLA, =j=RAI 



Berejjger Ra 



ilatilda, dau. of =(1) ALFONSO Il.f (2) = Sancha, dau. of 
Alfonso 1. 1162-1196. Alfonso VIII. 

of Portugal. of Castile. 



Eiimosd Berenger III. 
of Provence, 
ob. s.p. 1181. 



» By this marriage Catalonia was united to Aragon. 

t Alfonso II. interfered in Provence nominally in behalf of the 
heiress of Raimond Berenger II., but kept it for himself, and gave 
it to his brotht-is and son in succession. 

% Hence the Aragonese claim to Naples and Sicily. 

|| With her, Provence went to the Houso of Anjou in Naples. 

? Succeeded to Sicily on death of Ins son. 

** Elected to Aragon and Sicily on death of Martin the Elder. 
Henceforth Aragnn ;m,l Sicily remain united. 

■ft King of Naples also, in succession to Joanna II. 

ft King of Navarre also, in right of his first wife. 



Alfonso, ob. 1200. 



Margaret = St. Louis. 



: Henry III. of England. 



2. Jayme I.. 1. PEDRO iil., 1276-1285; T Constance,* dau. of 3. Iol'ande- Alfonso X. of 4. Isabella (1) Philip III. of 

ob. 1311. 1 . of Sicily, 1282-1285. Manfred. Castile. France. 



Sancha = Richard of Cornwall. 

Sicily: 



Sancho,= Mary, dau. of Ferdin I, 

ob. 8. p. Charles II. ob. 1318. 

1324. of Naples. i 



Jayjie II. ob. 1349. = 3. Constance. 
Joanna I. of Naples (3) = Jayjie, ob. s. p. 1375. 



Iolaude = Robert c 



AYME II., = Blanche, dau. of Charles II. 

K. of Sicily, 1285-1291. | of Naples. 

K. of Aragon, 1291-1327. 

Theresa d'Euteca = (I) ALFONSO IV., (2) Eleanor, dan. of Ferdinand IV. 
I 1327-1336. of Castile. 



2. Jaynie, C. of Urgel. 
Pedro. 



Mary, dau. of Philip of Evreux, = (1) I. PEDRO IV., (2) = Eleanor, dau. of Alfonso IV. of Portugal. I 

Iv. of Navarre - Marthaj =(4) 1336 - 1387 - (3) = Elean l or _ Beatrii - Robert II., Elector Palatine. 



Frederick II. = Constance, dau. of 



Frederick II. of Sicily=Constan 



Juan I. of Castile. = 3. Eleanor. 



1. JUAN I.. 1387-1395. 



ENRIQUE III. of Castile. 



Blanche of Navarre, widow of Martin I. of Sicily. j (1) JUAN II.JJ 1458-1479 (2) = J 



Blanche, dan. of (1) = 1 Martin 1. of Sicily, i2j Mauy, 
Charles 111 of Navarre. 1391-1 '• 19, ob. s. p. 1377-1402. 

anor = Edward of Portugal. 



Mary = Juan II. of Castile, 
i of Castile, 



Character of Ferdinand. 355 

Ferdinand was a bigot ; he was not free from the 
taint of perfidy tossed to and fro so freely in that age; 
he was parsimonious, subtle and insincere ; he utterly 
lacked geniality, and never threw off the gravity which 
he thought becoming the Spanish grandee ; he indulged 
in vicious gallantries, in egotistic designs, in an ill- 
assorted second marriage ; he was suspicious, vulgar, 
and uneducated ; all this one is willing to grant, and 
yet concede that there were elements of true grandeur 
in his character. In the judgment of many of his con- 
temporaries, he was the most renowned and glorious 
monarch ki Christendom. Impartial, economical, inde- 
fatigable in his application to business, he was neither 
epicure nor ostentatious • he loved history, horseman- 
ship, the rites and ritual of a splendid church ceremo- 
nial, knightly virtues and chivalrous undertakings ; and 
with unusual control over his temper, undaunted per- 
sonal courage, and a far-seeing political sagacity, he 
made few bad mistakes, and, by wonderful good fortune, 
raised Spain, jointly with his magnanimous queen, from 
a conglomeration of reciprocally hostile states into a 
spacious and concentrated European empire. 



CHAPTER XVI. 
THE SPANISH NAVIGATORS. 

COLUMBUS, starting out with letters for the Grand 
Khan of Tartary, is a type of the Spanish navi- 
igators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Ignor- 
ance, superstition, romanticism, boundless pluck, quaint 
pertinacity of purpose, love of gold, imaginative schemes 
for the re-conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, the hope of 
prefixing Don (up to that time allowed only to persons 
of rank) to their names, the hope of immortality and of 
immensely extending the Castilian arms ; such were a 
few of the motives impelling the men of that age and 
producing the intellectual fermentation which char- 
acterized these famous centuries. 

Silks, gems, precious stones, luxurious commodities, 
perfumes, wealth of all sorts, played hide-and-seek 
before the credulous imaginations of the age, tempting 
men on vague report to venture their frail barks out on 
unknown waters, stimulating commercial intercourse 
between nations, making men ransack dusty libraries 
for old copies of Strabo, Pliny, Mela, Plato, ancl Ptol- 
emy, that they might see what the ancients had said 
about elysiums beyond the seas, and filling the univer- 
sities and Mediterranean towns with throngs of men, 

356 



Two Helpful Instruments. 357 

eager to test by actual experiment the existence of the 
New Atlantis, the shadowy Cipango, and the glittering 
principalities of the remote Indies. 

A rapid and universal advance in culture ensued on 
the invention of printing. Men no longer won their 
sole education by campaigning in Palestine, Germany 
or Italy, and wresting from Guelph or Infidel a labori- 
ous subsistence. The scholar, the recluse, the brood- 
ing ecclesiastic, the conventual hermit, the burgher and 
the nobleman alike, could stay at home, read of the 
remarkable achievements of men, pursue speculative 
and experimental science to advantage, and gradually 
attain that point whence discovery of every sort followed 
as a matter of course. Even " the Ocean Sea," gloomy 
and immeasurable as it spread out from the western 
shores of Europe, came at length to be timidly trav- 
ersed ; the girdling equatorial tires crossed ; the fantas- 
tical!}' brilliant sunlight of the poles penetrated ; the 
scented spice islands, so alluring to the early navigators, 
tracked and revealed ; whilst the sparkling archipela- 
goes of India and Mexico, where men were said to 
catch gold in nets and festoon themselves with pearls, 
opened like some fairy-land before their gaze. 

Two simple instruments- — the Compass and the 
Astrolabe — helped to do all these wonders for man- 
kind. The Chinese, it is said, had groped about their 
yellow seas with a southward-pointing needle, to which 
polarity had been communicated by means of the load- 
stone, as early as the third or fourth century of the 
Christian era ; but the use of the needle in Europe, 
though probably of considerable antiquity, is not men- 
tioned before noo. The loves of the needle and the 



358 Spanish Navigators, 

North star, the steadfastness with which the metallic 
thread pointed to the bright apparition of the star 
Alpha, — were a mystery and a wonder to the simple 
navigators as they began to utilize the discovery and 
pass through the Pillars of Hercules out into the 
unknown sea. 

Then Martin Behem invented for the Portuguese a 
huge iron ring three feet in circumference, — the Astro- 
labe, — by which latitude could be taken. Arabian 
sages had meanwhile been measuring a degree of lati- 
tude, and calculating the circumference of the globe. 
Prince Henry of Portugal, in whose veins flowed the 
blood of Philippa of Lancaster, gave a wonderful im- 
petus to discovery, before his death in 1473, by endow- 
ing a naval college and observatory, and accomplishing 
the exploration of the African coast from Cape Blanco 
to Cape de Verde, unravelling the darkness of the occi- 
dental seas for fifteen hundred miles, and plucking from 
them as it were, the Azores with their myriads of hawks, 
and the horizon-touching Cape de Verde islands, far to 
the west. 

It is delightful to read of the Portuguese navigators ; 
of Lisbon in the fifteenth century, marvelling and mar- 
vellous with ever-recurring tales of new lands and con- 
tinents in the Antartic south ; of new expeditions 
steadily putting forth from the ports of the little king- 
dom, to re-achieve Hanno's legendary circumnavigation 
of Africa j of squadrons returning with sun-burnt Lusi- 
tanian tars, whose lips waxed as eloquent as Maunde- 
ville's or Marco Polo's, over the things they had seen 
and suffered in those seas ; of Vasco de Gama, a little 
later on, performing his dazzling tour de force of doub- 




THE SIERRA DE OCA, NEAR MIRANDA DE EFSRO. 



Poetical Adventures. 36] 

ling the cape of Good Hope and passing on to the 
diamonds and pagodas of the Orient ; of papal bulls 
granting the Portuguese sovereign authority over all the 
lands his people might discover in the Atlantic to India 
inclusive, and. threatening disaster to all who should 
interfere with these discoveries. 

Though love of money was largely at the bottom of 
these astonishing deeds, there is hardly one of the 
primitive navigators, from Columbus in his diaries to 
Cortes in his commentaries ; from Vespucius, dimly trav- 
elling in Columbus's track to Orellana, floating down 
the mighty Amazon, who was not a poet. Setting forth 
in their crazy caravels, without logarithms, dead reck- 
oning lines, or means of determining the variations of 
the magnetic needle ; without decks to their ships ; ex- 
posed to the icy chill of the Atlantic night and the 
blaze of the equatorial day ; with mouldy provisions, 
drenched skins, and comfortless quarters, month in 
month out, they went on with unconquerable gladness, 
ship after ship full of smiling argonauts, — a-search for 
the golden fleece, reminding us of the rowers of the 
Odyssey, steadfast as stars to find land in these illimit- 
able waters and guided to it in the end with an instinct 
truly infallible. 

The old saga-tellers of Iceland have left us in Eirik 
the Red's saga, a charming account, vividly portrayed, 
of the southward sailings of the Icelanders ; of their 
meeting with the elf-locked Esquimaux ; of their pas- 
sage to the St. Lawrence, and of the white buffalo 
robes, long spears, war-whoop, feather-decked garments, 
and weapons of the red Indians they met ; but we have 
no account prior to Columbus of the great oceanic em- 



362 Spanish Navigators. 

pire in the South wherein Columbus hung his pear- 
shaped paradise, wherein he expected to hear the 
pagoda-bells of China, where his exquisite poetic sense 
gave a mysterious intelligence to everything, and where 
everything was pregnant with scriptural allusion or 
prophecy for him. 

Columbus's probable birthplace was Genoa, and the 
date of his birth has been approximately determined as 
having occurred about the year 1435. His early knowl- 
edge of geography, astronomy, geometry, and navigation 
was acquired at the university of Pavia. At fourteen 
he w?\s before the mast, peering into dim seas and pic- 
turing to himself undiscovered mountains with the 
ardent imagination of one precociously ripened and 
already conscious of a destiny awaiting him. His 
Mediterranean and Levant voyages are beclouded with 
doubt ; but in 1470 we clearly find him at Lisbon — a 
man of light-gray, kindling eyes, hair of snow at thirty, 
irritable though affable, blond as any Teuton, simple- 
mannered yet authoritative in speech, a religious en- 
thusiast who supported himself by pencilling maps 
and charts ; a meditative cosmographer perpetually 
brooding over the sinuous lines of his sea-drawings, and 
providentially haunted by apparitions of land to the 
west, — the Fortunate Isles, Plato's Atlantis, the Cartha- 
ginian Antilla, the bright-tinted Canaries and Azores, 
the lovely garden of the Hesperides floating and flash- 
ing on the curve of the horizon — a poetic maze of 
truth and error, involving him in feverish disquietude 
and fed by the family of navigators into which he had 
married in Portugal. 

A passion seized Columbus to know everything that 



Christopher Columbus. 363 

had been known or written, by ancients or moderns, on 
geography, and he drew up a sort of creed by which 
from various points of view he convinced himself, and 
eventually others, that there must be a western passage 
to the cities of the Indies. His enthusiasm polarized 
every piece of corroborative testimony, and made it point 
straight in the direction of his theory. He convinced 
himself, from the reports of navigators, the authority of 
learned writers, and the very nature of things, that 
land — the over-lapping wing of Asia, stretching far to 
the east, and voluming out like a vast curtain with a 
Europe-ward curve — lay beyond the Azores. He was 
a man of singularly beautiful fancy, erudite in a certain 
sense withal, with a solemn sort of eloquence that inter- 
ested people who from regarding him as a visionary 
guilty of a fixed idea, came to look upon him as an 
inspired sailor and prophet, and at length even tried to 
surround him with the halo of a saint. The palaces of 
Cathay, with roofs of burnished plates of gold, cam- 
phire-illumined ceilings, where the pearly sea-grit was as 
plentiful as blackberries, and the wealth reported by 
the great Venetian traveller encrusted every city and 
highway ; gold dust, ivory, slaves, fantastic minarets, 
and monstrous idols with blazing jewels for eyes \ all 
these things danced before his eyes, and he saw in them 
the means for the realization of his life-long scheme — 
the recover}' of the Holy Land out of the hands of the 
Saracen. 

In 1484 he left Lisbon with his son Diego, exasper- 
ated at the faithlessness and vacillation of King Joa, 
and made his way painfully to Spain. 

Here for seven years (1 485-1 492) he hung around 



364 The Spanish Navigators. 

the Bohemian court of Ferdinand and Isabella, — a 
court perpetually flitting from point to point according 
as the exigencies of the Moorish war demanded, — 
urging his claims, discussing his project at Cordova," 
and before the doctors of Salamanca, refuting the Bib- 
;: cal and patristic texts with which they assailed him to 
j. rove the impossibility of a western continent, following 
the court like a faithful hound into the very heart of the 
Moorish dominions ; pointed at by the very children as 
a madman, ridiculed for his notion of an antipodes 
where they said men must needs walk heels upward, 
trees grow into, instead of out of the earth, rain and 
snow shoot out of the soil skyward, and the very ro- 
tundity of the earth would make a mountain barrier, up 
which no ship could sail. 

There were many people, however — not doctors of 
Salamanca or cavaliers of Cordova — who were struck 
with the grandeur of Columbus's views ; none more so 
than Juan Perez, the worthy prior of the convent of La 
Rabida, and the Pinzons, a family of famous navigators 
living at Palos on the sea. 

By their help he ultimately overcame the distrust of 
the suspicious Ferdinand, gained access to the sover- 
eigns, wrung from them by his perseverance, the titles 
of admiral and viceroy over the countries he should 
discover, and owner of one-tenth of all gains thence 
accruing, and even inspired the heroic Isabella to de- 
clare " that she undertook the enterprise for her own 
crown of Castile, and pledged her jewels to raise the 
necessary funds." 

The gracious queen — in marked opposition to the 
short-sighted king — thus became the patroness of the 
noblest expedition ever planned ; and it is said the 




BANKS OF THK DARRu. GRANADA. 



TJie Npav World Found. 307 

same pen that signed the capitulation of Granada in 
1492, virtually signed the agreement of the sovereigns 
to Columbus's stipulation the same year. 

The funds for the expedition came temporarily out of 
the treasury of Aragon, though the glory and aggran- 
dizement arising from it redound to the memory of the 
enlightened Isabella of Castile. 

Columbus was fifty-six — he had been a suppliant for 
eighteen years — at this triumphant moment of his life, 
— triumphant, indeed, when we consider with what slight 
means he was to achieve his enterprise. 

The Santa Maria, the Pinta, and the Nina — quaint, 
high-pooped, forecastled structures, two of them open- 
decked and one with lateen sails — glided out of the 
little port of Palos with the " high-admiral of the Ocean 
sea " and one hundred and twenty souls aboard, in Au- 
gust, 1492 ; and cleaving the Gibraltar seas, sped south- 
westerly toward the Peak of Teneriffe and the Canaries. 
Martin Alonzo Pinzon and his brothers, Francisco and 
Alcente Yanez, accompanied him. 

Land ! 

Columbus himself had won the ten thousand marave- 
dis promised to him who should first see land ; for on 
the night of Friday, October nth, 1492, he had beheld 
lights glimmering at a great distance, and the next 
morning the weary navigators threw themselves on their 
knees with passionate tears of thanksgiving, and called 
the land San Salvador. 

Columbus lived and died in the illusion that it was 
the outspurs of India that he had discovered — whence 
the name given to the aborigines ; and throughout the 
varied experience of his four voyages he persisted in 
the belief. 



368 The Spanish Navigators. 

His fortunate miscalculation of the circumference of 
the globe, making him think that it was one-eighth 
smaller than it really was, drew him on with the hope 
that he should immediately see land. To keep up the 
spirits of his crews, he kept two reckonings, one for 
himself, with the true distances traversed from day to 
day, and the other altered, and intended to deceive his 
companions into the belief that they were not so far from 
their native land as was actually the case. The discovery 
of Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, the Pearl Islands, the 
mainland of South America and Central America, rapidly 
followed, the glory being left to Sebastian Cabot of dis- 
covering and coasting North America in the year 1497. 

Hoodwinked with his theories, Columbus wasted 
precious time and many lives in tracing and retracing 
his steps through the intricacies of the Caribbean archi- 
pelago, searching for the continent of Asia, the outlying 
evidences of Asiatic civilization, and an opportunity to 
avail himself of the Hebrew and Arabic interpreters 
whom he had brought with him to communicate with 
the inhabitants of the New World. 

To the apprehension of the simple islanders Colum- 
bus's ships had shot out of the crystal firmament ; the 
mariners were the children of the sun, beauteous- 
haired, from the burning East whence salvation was to 
come ; thunder and lightning flashed out of the rods 
they held in their hands ; they were luminous intelli- 
gences, not beardless, naked, tattooed like themselves 
or living on cassava-bread, yuca root, and fruits, but 
fair spirits that lavished on them hawk's bells, strings 
of crystal made in the skies, and cloths colored like the 
dawn. They ran after the Spaniards and worshipped 



Sensation in Spain. 369 

them as supernatural beings, treated them with gentle 
benignity, and gave them their ornaments of gold with 
affecting readiness. 

The announcement of these discoveries made a pro- 
found sensation in Spain. Rumors of the golden 
islands, of the marvellous sun-colored birds, of fish 
with scales that flashed like precious stones, of thou- 
sand-tinted dolphins, of forests of spice-woods spark- 
ling with the winged radiance of the humming-bird, the 
blood-red flamingo, the sapphire-sharded insect life of 
the tropics, of regions where the birds and crickets 
sang all night, and the hurricanes cast ashore multi- 
tudes of lustrous shells — spread all over Spain, and 
made Columbus's journey through the country, on his 
return, a triumphal procession. 

More precious, however, than any cinnamon, nutmeg, 
or rhubarb, that they were ever in search of, were the 
potato-plant, the Indian corn, the sweet pepper, the 
intoxicating tobacco, the strange fruits of this populous 
island-studded archipelago. " The infinity of great and 
green trees " excited the admiration of the admiral, and 
he told his royal auditors of how the natives had 
canoes, made out of the trunk of a tingle tree, capable 
of holding one hundred and fifty persons; of the beauty 
of the tropical vegetation ; of the perfectly naked 
women with rings in their noses ; of the easy rule of 
the Indian caciques ; of the multitudes of fish, turtle, 
and game, found everywhere ; of the grace and prince- 
liness of many of the native sovereigns ; of the caress- 
ing hospitality they met with ; of the mystic mermaiden 
they had seen on their way home ; the fierce Caribs they 
had encountered; and their eventual arrival in Portugal, 



870 The Spanish Navigators. 

after planting the colon}' of La Navidad in the New 
World. 

The whole of Europe soon rang with these thrilling- 
stories. The germ of the mighty India House of Spain 
was planted at Seville. Isabella's compassionate heart 
interested itself in the spiritual welfare of the poor 
Indians. Columbus was more than confirmed in all his 
powers and privileges. The difficulties between Spain 
and Portugal, relative to their mutual rights in the At- 
lantic, were settled in 1494 on the basis that a line 
should be drawn from pole to pole, three hundred and 
seventy leagues west of the Cape de Verde islands, and 
that Spain should have a right to all discoveries made 
west of this line, and Portugal to those made east of it. 

In 1493 Columbus sailed anew; discovered the beau- 
tiful semi-circle of the Antilles inhabited by the Caribs ; 
thoroughly explored Hispaniola, where hardly a trace of 
the colony left could be found ; gathered specimens of 
amber, lapis lazuli, jasper, and gold-dust; heard of the 
melon, gourd, and cucumber seed which he had planted, 
bearing fruit within a month ; coasted Cuba carefully 
(1494), and discovered Jamaica. 

The air here was filled with the living sparkles of 
innumerable butterflies : ponderous clusters of grapes 
clung to the giant grape vines ; tortoises thronged the 
low keys and reefs of the milky waters south of Cuba ; 
cranes stood drawn up in solemn array among the for- 
ests, and filled the superstitious Spaniards with affright ; 
the tree clefts were full of honey ; the islands shot 
forth fragrances to delight their senses ; and they saw 
the natives catching fish and tortoises by means of the 
-ucker-ftsh, which, tied bv the tail to a long string, was 



Oysters on Trees. 371 

said to dart fiercely on its prey and attach itself until 
forced to relinquish it by being drawn out of the water. 

Colonization sprang up swiftly in the footsteps of Co- 
lumbus. He had waved his enchanter's wand, and the 
gates of a New World seemed to fly open for all the rest- 
less blood then in Europe to discharge itself through. 

In 1498 he undertook his third voyage with a squad- 
ron of six ships and sailed through the gulf of Paria, 
where he found mangrove trees clustered with oysters, 
their mouths open, according to the legend, ready to 
catch the dew, afterward to be transformed into pearls. 
He encountered the huge volume of fresh water pour- 
ing forth from the great Oronooco, and speculated in- 
geniously about it. On his arrival at Hispaniola he 
found the whole island in confusion. — Everywhere 
through his voyages he encountered mutinies, rebellion, 
opposition, threats of assassination, and untold suffer- 
ings from shipwreck, ill-health, desertion, and shame- 
less tittle-tattle ; but succored by his brothers, Don 
Diego and the Adelantado Don Bartholomew, and sus- 
tained by his own indomitable spirit, he was enabled to 
endure even the last indignity of being sent home in 
irons by Bobadilla at the conclusion of his third voyage, 
to answer charges brought against him by his enemies 
in Castile. 

His benefactress always welcomed him kindly, but 
Ferdinand lent a willing ear to gossip, and humiliated 
Columbus as he had humiliated the great Gonsalvo. 

In 1497 Vasco de Gama doubled the Cape of Good 
Hope, and three years later Pedro Alvarez de Cabral, 
sailing in the interest of Portugal to Calicut, took pus- 
session of Brazil, discovered earlier the same year, by 



372 The Spanish Navigators. 

Vicente Yafiez Pinzon and Diego Lepe, in the name of 
Portugal, because the land lay eastward of the line 
agreed upon by the two powers, as the boundary of 
their respective discoveries. 

In this way Brazil came to belong to Portugal. Vi- 
cente Pinzon was the first European who crossed the 
western equinoctial line, though Gama in his expedition 
of 1497, immortalized in the Lusiadas of Camoens, 
must first have observed the constellation of the South- 
ern Cross, which became at once the symbol of faith, 
and the lode-star of the southern hemisphere. 

Columbus in 1502, departed at the age of sixty-seven, 
on his fourth voyage, full of infirmities, often racked by 
pain, broken down in health, but invincibly bent on fur- 
ther extending the discoveries he had begun. He had 
nobly vindicated himself from the charges of Bobadilla 
and now ventured out for the last time, in four barks of 
from fifty to seventy tons each, in search of a strait 
through the Isthmus of Darien. He coasted Honduras, 
the Mosquito coast, Costa Rica, in ships honeycombed 
by the teredo ; fancied the mines of Veragua to be the 
A urea Chersonesus of Josephus ; and was finally 
stranded on the island of Jamaica, where twelve months 
of anxiety, hunger, thirst, and disease were spent. 

In Hispaniola hundreds of thousands of the natives 
had perished by disease, massacre, or the bloodhound, 
during the first twelve years of colonization. From 
visitors from heaven the Spaniards had soon trans- 
formed themselves into demons from hell. Licentious- 
ness, torture, extortion, the fatal repartimiento or distri- 
bution of the natives among the ruffians of the colony, 
did their work but too effectually, and changed these 




PEASANT OF THE ENVIRONS OF GRANADA 



The Companions of Columbus. 375 

lovely islands into dens of lasciviousness and death. 
From the beginning, a curse lay on the Latin conquests 
in the New World ; conquests accomplished by perfidy, 
cruelty, and lust. 

The old navigator passed away in 1506; Columbus 
died as he had lived, a devout Catholic, and his ashes, 
deposited at first in Valladolid, then in Seville, passed 
over to San Domingo in 1536 whence, in 1796, — as 
has been lately established by the Spanish Royal Acad- 
emy of History, — 'they were transported to Havana. - 

Thus ended the career of the great poet and dis- 
coverer — perhaps so great a discoverer because so 
richly endowed with the prophetic instinct, the enthu- 
siasm, the imaginative vision of the poet. 

Columbus's companions soon greatly developed and 
extended his discoveries. It was a time "fulfilled with 
fairy ; " the attraction toward unknown lands was irre- 
sistible. 

Vicente Pinzon discovered the La Plata river in 1508 ; 
a year signalized by the importation of negroes into 
Hayti (Hispaniola) from Guinea. In 15 11, Diego 
Columbus effected the conquest of Cuba, and in 15 13 
Vasco Nunez de Balboa, crossing the Isthmus with 
dauntless intrepidity, cast eyes for the first time on the 
enormous sheet of the Pacific ocean. 

Ponce de Leon, an aged Castilian knight, having 
heard of a land to the far northwest, where tradition said 
there was a fountain of perpetual youth, sailed thither- 
ward, and coming on a beautifully sunny, and flowery 
coast, dubbed it, after the clay (Pascua Florida, Palm 
Sunday) on which it was discovered, Florida. 

There seemed to be enterprises, discoveries, con- 



376 The Spanish Naviyators. 

quests, for everybody in those happy times. The begin- 
ning of the reign of Charles V. was illustrated by the 
discovery (151 8) of the coast of Mexico, and some 
years later of Peru. In 1521, Magellan, sailing under 
the Spanish Hag, circumnavigated South America, and 
passing from island to island, came upon another archi- 
pelago of twelve hundred islands, to which the name of 
Philippine islands, in honor of Philip II., was after- 
wards given — ■ an archipelago more than thirteen hun- 
dred miles in length and eight hundred in breadth, a 
replica of the exquisite picturesqueness and fertility of 
the Caribbeean group. Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurri- 
canes, are the scourge of these sunlit latitudes, whose 
prodigious wealth in tropical fruits, ebony, sandal-wood, 
spices, dyes, silver, sulphur, and gold, whose unrivalled 
scenery and luxuriance, whose gorgeous coloring, popu- 
lation of Papuas, Malays, Chinese and Spaniards, and 
superstitions, have ever since offered so great attractions 
to the merchant, artist, and ethnologist. 

The subjugation of the Mexican and Peruvian em- 
pires was an achievement worthy of an heroic age. 
There is perhaps nothing in fabulous story — in Iliad or 
in Nibelungenlied — which quite equals the deeds of 
Hernando Cortes and Francisco Pizarro — the one a 
student of Salamanca, the other so ignorant that he 
could neither read nor write his own name. 

Corte's's commentaries on his campaigns have been 
likened to Caesar's ; Pizarro's dispatches read like a 
romance. Cortes's achievement was the more remark- 
able of the two, since it was original with himself and 
occurred against odds so overwhelming. Pizarro mod- 
elled himself distinctly after Corte's, even to the very 



TJie Mexico of the Aztecs. 377 

stratagem by which the empire of the Incas at one blow 
sank in ruins. Here the parallelism ceases, for Cortes 
was a man of genius, reconstructing what he had de- 
stroyed, legislating serenely and successfully amid 
intense excitement, renovating, consolidating, laying 
the foundations of a great empire again, and command- 
ing admiration for the many elements of nobility, hero- 
ism, unselfishness, and administrative skill displayed in 
his character. Pizarro though a man of marked ability, 
was essentially a ruffian by birth, a foundling from an 
obscure village in Estremadura, who died by the hand 
of the assassin in the great country he had conquered. 
The timid, caste-ridden, enervated Peruvians, too, 
were very different from the implacable Aztecs, the san- 
guinary Tlascalans. and the acute Tezcucans, who 
hurled their thousands against Cortes's little band, and 
struggled impotently to cast them back into the sea. 

The Mexico of the Aztecs was said to have covered 
an area of nearly fifty thousand square miles, though 
the part with which we are immediately concerned — 
the lake district — filled an area of only about sixteen 
hundred square miles, the size of Rhode Island. 
Whether the inhabitants of the Western continent were 
aboriginal • whether they came by Behring's straits 
from the Asiatic coast, or crossed hundreds of leagues 
of sea as they journeyed from island to island of the 
Pacific, and finally landed in the American country, or 
whether an " Atlantis," now submerged, really existed 
in the Atlantic, whence they made their way from Eu- 
rope laboriously thitherwards, in prehistoric times, are 
at present subjects for ingenious though fruitless spec- 
ulation. 



378 The Spanish Navigators . 

The country of Mexico, like Spain itself, is a system 
of gigantic terraces, rising from the gulf to an exten- 
sive tableland from five thousand to eight thousand 
feet above the sea, and culminating in the cones of 
Orizaba and Popocatepetl, which almost cast their 
shadows over the city of Mexico. Beneath these 
mighty volcanoes — which tower more than three miles 
above the sea — lay a system of lakes about which had 
gathered a population of some two hundred and fifty 
thousand souls, cultivated to a point that recalls much 
of what we know of ancient Egypt and Assyria. (Cor- 
tes frequently gives what he saw, the palm of superiority 
over what was then to be seen in contemporary Europe.) 
The naked islanders of the archipelago were here re- 
placed by a well-organized confederacy of races com- 
posed of the descendants of seven tribes from the 
north, and as far as is known, without communication 
with the other great sovereignty of the south. They 
possessed a considerable degree of culture when Cor- 
tes, commanding the Armada dispatched by Velasquez, 
governor of Cuba, arrived in the country in 15 19. 
Dwelling high above the fever-smitten swamps of the 
Warm Land, as the Atlantic coast was called, they were 
a race bold, hardy, and persevering; a hive of na- 
tions — Toltecs, Chichimecs, Aztecs or Mexicans, and 
Acolhuans — succeeding or conquering one another, 
variously gifted, and busy with the arts of an almost 
civilized community. 

It will be impossible to enter into their feuds, tradi- 
tions and coalitions before the conquest, therefore only 
a condensed sketch of characteristic customs and pecu- 
liarities will be attempted. 




BALCONIES AT GRANADA. 



The Aztec Community. 381 

Entirely false notions have hitherto prevailed with 
regard to the Aztec community, now fortunately almost 
entirely removed by the valuable researches of Morgan* 
and Bandelier.t These researches have shown incon- 
trovertibly that in a European sense there was neither 
a state, a nation, nor a political society of any kind 
in aboriginal Mexico. The Spaniards found there a 
varied population, divided into tribes speaking various 
languages, each tribe autonomous in matters of govern- 
ment, and occasionally forming confederacies for pur- 
poses of self-defence and conquest. The ancient 
Mexicans as typical of this aboriginal constitution, 
have been shown to be an organic body, composed 
of twenty consanguine groups or kins, voluntarily 
associated for purposes of mutual protection and sub- 
sistence. This social organization, so far from exhibit- 
ing the complex conditions of a feudal state, as it 
appeared to the excited Spaniards, and as it is de- 
scribed in the current histories, was a democratic 
body ; each of the kins was governed by its own 
strictly elective officers subject to removal at the pleas- 
ure of their constituents ; the associated kins, for their 
mutual benefit, had delegated their powers to transact 
business without to a council of the tribe, in which each 
consanguine group or kin was represented by one mem- 
ber; the execution of the decrees of this council was 
left to elective officers, whose powers were limited to 
military command, and whom the tribe might depose at 

^Ancient Society, pp. 186-214. 

t Social Organization and Mode of Government, Art of Warfare 
and Mode of Warfare, and Distribution and Tenure of lands of the 
Ancient Mexicans; three extremely important treatises published 
in 1877, VS and '79 by the American Archaeological Association. 



382 The Spanish Xavigators. 

pleasure ; these officers with the exception of certain 
inferior positions, could not appoint others to office, 
not even their assistants of high rank ; the dignity of 
chief, such as Montezuma held, so far from being the 
prerogative of hereditary nobility, was simply a reward 
of merit, carrying with it no other privileges than per- 
sonal consideration and a more or less distinctive cos- 
tume ; and the final result of the last scrutiny into 
Mexican ki civilization " is, that it was the result of a 
social organization based upon a military democracy, 
itself originally based upon community of living, and 
consanguineous relationship. 

Such conclusions, of course, entirely overthrow the 
fictitious " elective monarchy " of the English and 
Spanish historians ; the terminology of feudal Europe 
was unhappily applied to the misunderstood League of 
the Lake ; and a so-called " Kingdom of Mexico " and 
" Empire of the Aztecs " was the result. 

Cortes found in the valley of Mexico the famous 
Nahuatl confederacy, composed of the three tribes 
called Aztecs or Mexicans, Tezcucans. and Tlacopans. 
The Aztecs were one of seven kindred tribes from the 
north that had settled in and near the valley of Mexico. 
These seven tribes were. i. the Sochimilcas, or Nation 
of the Seeds of Flowers; 2. the Chalcas. or People of 
Mouths ; 3. the Tepanecans, or People of the Bridge ; 
4. the Culhuas, or Crooked People; 5. the Tlatluicans, 
or Men of the Sierra ; 6. the Tlascalans, or Men of 
Bread ; and 7. the Aztecs, who came last and occupied 
the site of the present city of Mexico. They founded 
the celebrated pueblo of Mexico about a. d. 1325, 
which is supposed to have contained about thirty thou- 
sand inhabitants at the time of the arrival of Corte's. 



Aboriginal Life in Mexico. 388 

In 1426 the Aztec confederacy, composed of the Aztecs 
and the overthrown Tezcucans and Tlacopans, was 
formed : a league or confederacy of offence and defence, 
with the Aztecs at the head. 

Several points of great interest have been settled as 
to certain features of aboriginal life in ancient Mexico. 
It is now known that the ancient Mexicans, and presum- 
ably their tribal kindred, had no notion of abstract 
ownership of the soil either by a nation, or state, the 
head of the government or by individuals. 

As each tribe had as its unit of organization, the 
consanguine groups or kins before- mentioned, so pos- 
sessory rights were vested in them as a community, with 
no conception of sale, barter, conveyance or alienation 
of any kind. Individuals had only the right to use 
certain definite lots for their maintenance, a right hered- 
itary in the male line, yet limited to the conditions of 
residence within the area held by the kin, and of culti- 
vation either by or in the name of him to whom these 
lots were assigned. Neither Montezuma nor any of his 
chieftains or officers had property rights individually, 
except as he belonged to a certain kin, when he had 
the use of a certain lot which could be rented or farmed 
for his benefit. There were certain lots set aside as 
official lands, out of which public hospitality, the require- 
ments of tribal business, the governmental features of 
the kin, and the official households were supplied and 
sustained ; but both the lands and their products were 
independent of the persons or families of the chiefs 
themselves. 

Again, the conquest of a neighboring tribe by the 
Mexicans, was not followed by territorial annexation or 



384 The Spanish Navigators. 

by distribution of its lands among the conquerors. 
The Mexicans simply exacted tribute, which was paid 
from the produce of special lands set aside for that 
purpose. And finally neither a military despotism nor 
the principle and institution of feudality existed among 
the aboriginal Mexicans. 

The pueblo of Mexico was divided into four wards, 
constituted out of four groups of related people, each 
autonomous and each with its own chief and its own 
communal organization. Montezuma was simply the 
elective war-chief of the four wards, his election was 
sanctioned by the confederated tribes, and he had asso- 
ciated with him a dignitary called the '* Snake woman," 
or supreme , advisor of the tribe. The Mexicans had 
neither invented nor developed monarchical institutions. 
Montezuma's title was Teuctli, or war chief ; in the 
council of chiefs, elected by bodies of kindred to advise 
with him, he was sometimes called Tlatoani, or speaker. 
In other words, he was neither king nor emperor, but 
simply general. The office held by him was hereditary 
in a gens, was given by the gens to the worthiest brother 
or nephew of a dead chief, was ratified by the four di- 
visions or phratries of the Aztecs, and then by the Tez- 
cucans and Tlacopans acting through their representa- 
tives. The magniloquence of the Spaniards made of 
him an absolute potentate. 

A judicial system existed; murder, adultery, bribery, 
stealing, drunkenness, and extravagance were punisha- 
ble with death. Polygamy and slavery flourished. 
Taxes were laid on all objects of luxury. Granaries 
and warehouses for the reception of the tributes dotted 
the country. Couriers, trained to travel with great 



Mexican Religion. 385 

swiftness, carried hieroglyphical letters from one end of 
the country to the other. Montezuma, it is said, though 
he lived two hundred miles from the coast, had fish 
from the gulf on his table, twenty-four hours after they 
were caught. The wars of the aborigines were largely 
religious ; they had insignia of honor for those who dis- 
tinguished themselves; they used feather armor; cuir- 
asses of gold or silver ; and gorgeous tribal standards 
embroidered in gold and feather-work ; and their military 
organization though complicated, was free. 

The religion of the Mexicans required human sacri- 
fices eighteen times a year, attended by cannibalism ; 
deities in profusion formed their hierarchy, with a fan- 
tastic and sanguinary monster, Huitzilopotchli, Hum- 
ming-bird-on-the-left-foot, the God of war, at the head. 
Quetzalcoatl, a beneficent God, who taught them metal- 
work, agriculture, and the science of government, and 
who typified the Anahuac golden age, counter-balanced 
this bloody deity. The people had mystical expecta- 
tions connected with the east, out of which their benev- 
olent deity was to come again and bring back the 
" Saturnia regna " of ancient times. Everlasting dark- 
ness, eternal light, and a neutral limbo of negative 
contentment for those who had died of certain diseases, 
formed a cluster of beliefs connected with their notions 
of immortality curiously recalling the system of Ma- 
homet. The sun was the luminary around which the 
spirits of the blest danced ; then clouds and bright- 
plumaged singing birds received them in a perpetual 
intoxication of sense. At the naming of children, a 
ceremony resembling baptism took place. Their relig- 
ious observances were imposing ; numbers of priests 



386 The Spanish Xavigaiors. 

ministered at the fire-crowned temples, which, rising in 
pyramidal terraces, approached the Egyptian pyramids 
in form and magnitude. The temples were great schools 
where the youth were educated ; the priests could marry, 
though they had to practise great austerity at certain 
seasons. Rites resembling confession and absolution 
formed a part of their ritual. Large tracts of land 
supported the church establishment. Singing and 
dancing alternated in their ceremonial with horrible 
mutilation of hecatombs of human victims, whose hearts 
were torn out, and in some cases, it is said, were cast 
in thousands smoking on the altars of sacrifice. Along 
with this went a singular refinement in their love of 
liowers. 

The Aztec system of hieroglyphics — the key to 
which is now unfortunately lost — showed considerable 
ingenuity and culture. With some of these hieroglyph- 
ics were associated phonetic signs, though their em- 
ployers seem to have laid most stress on actual pictorial 
representation of the object described. Laws, tribute- 
rolls, calendars, rituals, political annals, chronological 
systems, were claimed to be stored up in these hiero- 
glyphics, which were swiftly and skilfully painted on 
cotton cloth, skins, aloe-paper or a composition of silk 
and gum. Spanish superstition and abhorrence of 
necromancy caused the destruction of the greater part 
of these invaluable records — for they associated dev- 
ilish arts and demoniacal devices with the characters in 
which these " manuscripts " were written. Thus, prob- 
ably, have hopelessly perished nearly all the traces of 
the literature of these nations, if they had one. 

They excelled in juggler} 7 and physical sleight; but 



Aztec Customs. 387 

their attainments in mathematics give them a claim to 
recognition as rivals, in a certain sense, of the Europeans. 
They seem to have had methods of indicating square 
and cube roots, fractions, and integers, little inferior to 
those used by the great mathematicians of antiquity 
before the Arabic ciphers were introduced. Their 
astronomical system was exact, and it was found on the 
arrival of the Spaniards that their method of comput- 
ing time was eleven days nearer the true time than that 
of their conquerors. 

Their year consisted of eighteen months, of twenty 
days each, with five intercalary days to make up the 
three hundred and sixty-five, and at intervals of fifty- 
two years they added twelve clays and a half to account 
for the annual excess of nearly six hours in the calen- 
dar. It is said that they came within an inappreciable 
fraction of the exact length of the tropical year as 
established by the most accurate observations. 

They were acquainted with the cause of eclipses and 
with the use of the sun-dial ; adjusted their festivals by 
the movements of the heavenly bodies ; and kindled their 
sacred fires anew every fifty-two years by the friction of 
sticks placed on the wounded breast of sacrificial victims. 

The Aztec husbandry evinced much intelligence, for 
it alternated years in the crops, irrigated, cherished for- 
estry, and stored up harvests in granaries. The banana, 
the chocolate-plant, and the maize were cultivated. 
They made sugar out of the Indian-corn stalks, intoxi- 
cating drinks out of grain and the aloe-plant, and main- 
tained semblances of zoological and botanical gardens. 
Their curious and fantastically carved emeralds and 
amethysts; their metal-work in gold and silver, their 



388 The Spanish Navigators. 

knives, razors, and sword-blades of obsidian ; their 
sculptured images, bas-reliefs, and calendar-stone ; their 
painted cups and vases, mineral and vegetable dye- 
stuffs, and brilliant-colored woven tissues of cotton, 
rabbit-hair, and feather-work, all showed much knowl- 
edge of the mechanical arts. 

They had great market-places where trade and t«raffic, 
by barter and by a sort of currency, were carried on 
with strict justice. Transparent quills of gold-dust ; T- 
shaped bits of tin, and grains of cacao in bags consti- 
tuted their money. Of iron they had no knowledge. 
The cities were divided among the various trade-guilds ; 
eke life of the merchant-spy was esteemed highly honor- 
able ; and slave-dealing had no disgrace attached to it. 

The domestic manners of the Aztecs were rather re- 
lined. The official classes were said to dine in com- 
munal halls among odoriferous herbs (performing their 
ablutions before and after meals). Perfumed tobacco, 
smoked in tortoise-shell or silver tubes, was esteemed a 
great after-dinner luxury ; and their tables were loaded 
with rude gold and silver vases and dishes, in which a 
variety of barbaric spiced viands, " pastry " and " con- 
fectionery " was served. (Morgan,* however, in his dis- 
cussion of "Montezuma's Dinner," has sufficiently 
shown that we must not place too implicit confidence in 
the swelling descriptions of Spanish adventurers on 
this point.) Dancing, singing of plaintive legendary 
ballads, and instrumental music closed their entertain- 
ments. 

Such is a silhouette of the so-called empire of Mon- 
tezuma. 

* North American Review, April, 1877. 




STUDENTS SERENA DIM 



Corttfs in Mexico. 3S1 

Cortes, had he not burnt his ships, allied himself with 
the tierce republic of Tlascala, which was the deadly 
foe of Montezuma, and taken advantage of the discords 
then rending this powerful democracy, would never 
have succeeded in his perilous undertaking. His two 
masterstrokes — the conciliation of the Tlascalans and 
the seizure of Montezuma — aided by his horses and 
firearms, which inspired dread; by accomplished sub- 
alterns like Sandoval and Alvarado ; and by his own 
cheerful and daunlless pluck — enabled him with a few 
hundred Spaniards and many thousand Tlascalans to 
overrun the country in about two years (15 19—152 1). 

This is no place to enter into the details of the hor- 
rors accompanying the conquest, the gloom of the Noche 
Ti-iste so famous for its disaster to the Spaniards, when 
they were driven out of the city, the siege of Mexico, 
and the beautiful and touching episode of Montezuma's 
captivity and death. Every outrage that could be com- 
mitted was committed by the conquerors despite the 
enlightened policy of their commander, which was to 
conciliate rather than to irritate. Perhaps there is no 
siege recorded in history more unparalleled than the 
siege of the city of Mexico ; and certainly, few charac- 
ters more heroic than that of the unfortunate Guate- 
mozin. 

Corte's extended his reputation afterward by the dis- 
cover}- of the gulf of California in 1537. 

The conquest of the empire of the Incas in 1531, in 
little more than a year, was an achievement second 
only to the conquest of Mexico, in glory and in far- 
reaching results. Balboa's great discovery — swiftly 
followed as it was by his tragical death — remained 



892 The Spanish Navigators. 

unutilized nearly twenty years. In 15 19 the city of 
Panama was founded on the Pacific side of the isthmus, 
and from that time, rumors of a mighty empire to the 
south filled the air and roused the Spanish imagination, 
already exalted by the wonderful events in Mexico, to 
realize its dreams in further explorations. 

But it was not until 1526 that the celebrated contract 
for the conquest of Peru was signed by the two adven- 
turers, Pizarro and Almagro, and the ecclesiastic De 
Luque, by whom chiefly, with little aid from the Span- 
ish government, this memorable enterprise was effected. 
Several preliminary expeditions, pregnant with disaster, 
suffering, and final success, were undertaken by these 
men, who rambled with their soldiers through impene- 
trable forests, encountered starvation, tempest, and 
death by sea and by land, and at length, sailing into 
serener latitudes, came suddenly upon the fairy-land of 
the brilliant Incas, and stood, as it were, enthralled 
before an opulence and culture hitherto unimagined. 
Another problematic civilization sprang up before them, 
remote from all association, hedged in by boundless for- 
ests on the one side, and by boundless seas on the other, 
characterized by a refinement, splendor, and orderliness, 
superior in many respects to the Aztec. The immediate 
wealth flowing from this conquest was much greater than 
that produced by the conquest of Mexico ; and from this 
time on the mines of Peru began to pour that silver tor- 
rent into the coffers of Spain which seemed inexhaustible. 

This great empire extended north and south through 
thirty-nine degrees of latitude, embracing probably the 
states which are now known as Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, 
and Chili. The country is traversed by the enormous 



The Land of tlw Incas. 393 

backbone of the Cordilleras. It was covered with towns 
and villages ; llamas innumerable — the sheep of the coun- 
try — wandered over its heights ; gardens, settlements, 
farms, nestled among the terraces and precipices of the 
stupendous volcanoes. The natives were found to be 
under the rule of Incas or lords, who traced their de- 
scent from the sun. Cuzco was the royal residence ; a 
city situated in a beautiful valley, filled with solid struc- 
tures of every description, squares, public places, above 
all, the noble temple of the sun blazing with gold and 
jewels. Powerful fortresses were scattered through the 
country, built of enormous stones adjusted with skill. 

The succession in this empire was hereditary, and 
the queen was at once sister and wife to the Inca. 
Military schools were maintained, where the youth were 
carefully educated in all warlike and manly exercises. 

The " Children of the Sun " among them, were dis- 
tinguished by huge pendants of gold hung from the 
ear, which stretched the lobe to such an extent that it 
became a frightful disfigurement. The ceremonies by 
which members of the royal family were, as it were, 
authenticated and recognized as belonging to the Inca 
race, closely resembled those attending the initiation of 
Christian knights in the feudal ages. 

The government was despotic ; the Inca wore a dress 
radiant with gold and precious stones, a wreathed tur- 
ban of many-colored folds, and plumes. Blazing with 
emeralds and ornaments he was borne in his solemn 
progresses through the kingdom in a litter, on the 
shoulders of men. There were magnificent roads ex- 
tending from one end of the kingdom to the other, 
along which inns were established for halting-places. 



394 The Spanish Navigators. 

Immense palaces at various points in his dominions, 
received the monarch in his many journeys — structures 
of stone, with roofs of wood or rushes, gorgeously dec- 
orated within with images of animals and plants 
wrought in gold and silver, utensils of the same, and 
hangings of exquisite texture and color, made of the 
delicate Peruvian wool. 

We are told of subterranean channels of silver bear- 
ing water into basins of gold for the baths of the Incas ; 
groves and gardens filled with countless plants and 
flowers ; parterres of vegetable products skilfully imi- 
tated in the precious metals ; palaces in the cool Sierras 
recalling all that we have read in Ariosto or Spenser. 

At the death of the Inca, palaces, furniture, apparel, 
treasures, all were left to decay in strange ruin. Human 
blood flowed in torrents on his tomb ; his disembowelled 
remains were embalmed, and, arrayed in splendid attire, 
were placed in a golden chair and deposited in the great 
temple of the sun at Cuzco. 

The nobility had a distinguishing dress, dialect, and 
prerogative. The priests and generals came from their 
order. They were nearly all more or less related to 
the Inca blood, and hence gave to the royal family great 
strength and stability by their support. 

The nation called itself " the four quarters of the 
world," the name Peru or " river " having been given 
by the Spaniards, it is said, through a mistake. Hence 
the capital and the kingdom were in the same manner 
divided into four parts. 

A complicated social organization existed, suggestive 
of a peculiar and original people. The provisions for 
justice were as elaborate as among the Mexicans. Se- 




TOMB OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA IN THE CATHEDRAL OF (iKANADA. 



The Times of the Incas. 397 

vere laws, repressed crime. The Sun, the Inca, and the 
people divided the territory equally among them. The 
multitudinous priesthood and the costly ceremonial of 
the religious establishment, absorbed much both of land 
and treasure. The household, kindred, and govern- 
ment of the Inca likewise involved great expenditure. 
The soil put aside for the people was annually re-dis- 
tributed in certain allotments, on the basis of an in- 
creased or diminished family, so that every man had a 
portion of the soil and became virtually its proprietor 
for life. The Sun lands and the Inca's lands were first 
cultivated by the people ; then the lands belonging to the 
infirm and the widows ; then their own lands. Agricul- 
ture was diligently attended to, and the numerous flocks 
of Hamas were nurtured with sagacity. The spinning 
and weaving were all done by the families, who received 
due portions of wool to be wrought up for themselves 
and for the Incas. 

Registers of births and deaths were kept ; the census 
was taken ; surveys of the lands with their mineral 
and agricultural resources made ; and different prov- 
inces were assigned to different industries — mining, 
metal-working, and the like. Huge magazines of stone 
received and stored up the surplus products — maize, 
coca, wool, cotton, copper, silver, and gold. Mendi- 
cancy was forbidden ; public charity was generously 
shown the sick and unfortunate ; and idleness was a 
crime. Poverty and wealth seemed equallv banished 
from this remarkable realm, whose guiding principle 
was passive obedience to the sway of the divinely-de- 
scended ruler. 

The country abounded in great public works — aque- 



398 The Spanish Navigators. 

ducts, roads, fortresses, temples, palaces, and terraces 
— whose ruins to-day excite admiration for their gran- 
deur and massiveness. Suspension-bridges were thrown 
across the rivers and vast engineering difficulties sur- 
mounted in the construction of the great road which was 
said to be over fifteen hundred miles long, from twelve to 
twenty feet wide, flagged with freestone, and supported 
on solid masonry, where masonry was necessary. An- 
other road traversed the region between the ocean and 
the Andes, which was parapeted, lined by shade-trees, 
crossed causeways, threw light suspension-bridges 
woven of cables of aloe-fibre over rivers and streams, 
and was bordered every twelve miles by inns. Hum- 
boldt was justified in saying that the ruins of this great 
road might for beauty be compared with the finest he 
had seen in Italy, France, or Spain, and was one of the 
most useful as well as stupendous works ever con- 
structed by the hand of man. 

Posts for communication with various parts of the 
empire existed, at intervals of five miles, along the great 
roads, and dispatches forwarded by couriers dressed in 
livery, could be sent a distance of a hundred and fifty 
miles a clay. Connected with this was a package-post 
for game, fruit, fish, and the necessaries and luxuries of 
life, chiefly for the benefit of the nobles. Hence the 
ease with which news could be brought, insurrectionary 
movements crushed, and troops concentrated in any part 
of the empire, on short notice. 

A force of two hundred thousand men, armed with 
bows and arrows, slings, lances, darts, short-swords and 
battle-axes, dressed in the costumes peculiar to each 
province, headed by the brilliant-plumed, sparkling- 



Religion under the Inecu. 399 

casqued Inca generals, and overshadowed by the reful- 
gent device of the rainbow, could be readily brought 
into the field — more closely resembling a resplendent 
procession winding among the defiles of the Andes, 
than an army terrible with banners. 

Clemency was characteristic of the Inca conquerors; 
religious toleration was recognized among them — pro- 
vided that their great luminary-god were acknowledged 
as supreme ; the conquered princes were removed to 
the capital and their people admitted into a sort of cit- 
izenship ; they were compelled to learn the Quichua 
language, which was the language of the court and 
capital ; and in cases of doubtful loyalty the inhabitants 
of conquered provinces were removed in thousands to 
other parts of the empire, and their place supplied by 
loyal citizens. Residence could not be changed without 
license ; and in the case of compulsory removal, a con- 
genial climate was selected for the emigrants. 

History presents few examples of a nation so consol- 
idated and systematized, so controlled from the germ 
by a sagacious and harmonious principle, so logically 
developed by the policy of successive Incas. A com- 
mon religion, a common language, and a common gov- 
ernment thus resulted in no jangling confederation of 
jarring nationalities, but in a powerful, homogeneous, 
and civilized community habituated to obedience and 
attached to its own institutions. 

Religion was never more pompously enshrined than 
in the Peruvian " Houses of the Sun," especially in the 
renowned temple of Cuzco. A massive, sunlike, 
golden plate of enormous dimensions was said to catch 
the morning sun before the eastern portal, and scat- 



400 The Spanish Navigators. 

ter it in innumerable rays before the temple. The 
interior of the temple was one effulgence of gold and 
precious stones — golden friezes, cornices, walls, and 
ceilings. A chapel dedicated to the moon, lustrous with 
the pearly radiance of burnished silver, contrasted in its 
silvery spirituality with the golden glory prodigally 
claimed by the sun. 

An island in Lake Titicaca contained the most vener- 
ated ~of these sun-temples ; for hence proceeded, said 
tradition, the founders of the Peruvian line, and here 
the ancient monuments of their civilization are still to 
be seen in part. The sun, moon, and stars, the thunder, 
lightning, and rainbo-.v, were the peculiar objects of 
adoration. 

We are told that the great vases of Indian corn, the 
perfume-censers, the ewers and pipes connected with 
the great temple were of gold, while the gardens spar- 
kled with flowers and golden-fleeced Hamas of the 
same costly material. 

The festivals and national solemnities were conducted 
with barbaric pomp. Cannibalism was suppressed and 
human sacrifices lessened in numbers by the Incas. 
They used concave mirrors for kindling their sacred 
fire, which was then cherished by the Virgins of the 
Sun, an institution analogous to that of the Roman 
Catholic nuns or the Vestals of antiquity. These vir- 
gins lived in nunneries, and were destined not to eter- 
nal celibacy, but, as brides of the sun, became concu- 
bines of the Inca. 

Schools existed ; language, laws, religious rites, and 
rudimentary science were taught ; and records were 
kept in the peculiar hieroglyphic system, called quipu. 



Peruvian Literature. 403 

Cords of many-colored threads twisted together, with 
pendant fringes of white, yellow, red, and vari-tinted 
threads, knotted in an arbitrary manner, constituted the 
fundamental basis of this system, the chief value of 
which was for arithmetical purposes, for calculating 
revenues, keeping registers, and recording annals ; each 
knot, as has been said, suggesting to the skilled, a 
train of associations similar to that suggested by the 
number attached to the commandments of the dec- 
alogue. 

The Peruvians had legendary poetry, ballads, and a 
sort of theatrical exhibitions more or less dramatic. 
They were geographers to some extent, constructed 
maps, divided the year into twelve lunar months, took 
azimuths by measuring the shadows of cylindrical col- 
umns, and determined the equinoxes by a pillar set in 
the centre of a circle within the great temple, divided 
by a line drawn from east to west. Altar-fires blazed to 
the planet Venus ; diviners dabbled in astrology ; 
eclipses were viewed with affright. 

Tunnels, canals for irrigating purposes, and the abun- 
dant use of guano in their field culture, showed their 
skill and foresight in overcoming the obstacles of na- 
ture. As in Mexico, the greatest variety of climate and 
products existed, from the sun-bathed plains swimming 
in the incandescent atmosphere of the sea-level, 
through the mellowing humidity of the middle regions, 
up to those irradiated cones which, armored in adaman- 
tine ice, tower into dazzling altitudes and shoot flame 
and sunlight from their volcanic sides. 

The banana, the maize-plant, the aloe, the tobacco, 
the narcotic coca for chewing, a sort of rice, and many 



404 The Spanish Navigators. 

shrubs and medicinal herbs, were known to them. 
They were probably the only American race that em- 
ployed domestic animals, chiefly the llamas and the 
alpacas. Shawls, robes, hangings, of admirable delicacy 
and durability, showed their aptitude in working up the 
hair of animals. Bracelets, collars, and vases of gold 
and silver, elaborately wrought, evinced unusual metal- 
lurgical knowledge ; mirrors of polished stone or bur- 
nished silver ; utensils of fine clay and copper ; delicate 
cutting and setting of emeralds without knowledge of 
iron ; sculptured porphyry and granite ; extraction of 
the precious metals without knowledge of quicksilver ; 
ore-smelting, architectural monuments of great extent 
and magnificence, all give testimony of their superiority 
in the various arts. 

A refined, innocent, orderly people, they stand in the 
greatest contrast to the ferocious Aztecs. They guarded 
carefully against famine, invasion, and rebellion ; they 
worshipped the light; they abounded in institutions re- 
garded even by the Spaniards as exerting a favorable 
influence on the people, and though their system was 
an inexorable mechanism, all the parts were harmoni- 
ously related, and every detail was defined with pre- 
cision.* 

. Such was the nation against which the foundling, the 
pilot, and the missionary directed their romantic expe- 
dition. The story of their dropping down into those 
silent latitudes — their meeting with the wandering 
Indians on the passage, their landing at Tumbez, their 
reception as the children of the Sun by the simple natives, 

*Vid. G. Briihl, "Die Culturvolker Alt-Amerikas," 1S77-78-79. 



A Social Fabric Dissolved. 405 

their return to Panama, their final overthrow of this 
immense sovereignty with about one thousand men in 
little more than twelve months — is a story which would 
be characterized as pure fiction, did not undoubted 
evidence of the undertaking exist in the utmost fulness. 

Pfzarro's march over the Andes is equal to the most 
celebrated of Cortes's marches. His seizure and exe- 
cution of Atahuallpa, the powerful Inca of Peru, in the 
face of a countless army, is paralleled only by what 
happened in the case of Montezuma. The whole Peru- 
vian organization seemed to dissolve like a breath 
before the Spanish arms ; a handful of hungry cavaliers 
seemed to brush away instantaneously the whole fabric. 

The principal actors in the great drama perished by 
violent deaths. Almagro and his son, Gonzalo Pizarro 
and his brother Francisco, Carbajal, Hernando de Soto, 
Llasco Nunez the viceroy, Garcia de Alvarado, and the 
wretched Incas Manco and Atahuallpa, were either 
executed, murdered, or drowned \ and Hernando 
Pizarro languished in a Castilian prison for twenty 
years. 

Four years after the conquest of Peru, Jacques 
Cartier, a Frenchman, discovered the gulf of St. Law- 
rence, and Mendoza overran Buenos Ayres as far as 
Potosi, famous for the silver mines found there nine 
years later. In 1541 Chili was conquered; Orellana 
sailed down the Amazon, and Hernando de Soto (like 
Cortes and the Pizarros, an Estremaduran) discovered 
the Mississippi, and found a grave in its waters. The 
great navigators, Drake, Davis, and Frobisher added, 
by their discoveries, new lustre to the English name, 
while the Dutch navigators, Van Linschoten, Barendz, 



406 The Spanish Navigators. 

Heemskerk, De Veer, Ryp, Dirk Gerrits, and the Hout- 
manns, in their search for a passage to Cathay, dis- 
covered Spitzbergen, doubled the Cape of Good Hope 
and Cape Horn, and opened the way for the mighty 
Dutch East India company, which attached to the 
Netherlands, by the slender filaments of trade, a series 
of dependencies that encircled the globe. 

Thus had the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans become 
" Spanish Lakes; " the possessions of Spain in the New- 
World swept the poles, and a gigantic colonial system 
was built up which lasted clown to our day. Mexico, 
Peru, La Plata, and New Granada became opulent vice- 
royalties ; Yucatan, Guatemala, Chili, Venezuela, and 
Cuba remained captain-generalcies. 

The advent of Joseph Bonaparte in Spain, and the 
dethronement of Ferdinand VII. , produced (we may say 
in anticipation) revolutions in Spanish America, which 
resulted in the independence of all the great colonies 
except Cuba and Porto Rico. The land of the Incas 
became fully independent in 1824-26 ; New Granada 
and Venezuela finally in 1823 ; Mexico in 1829 ; and 
Guatemala in 1823.* 

The Portuguese colony of Brazil was finally established 
into an independent empire in the year 1822, with Dom 
Pedro as emperor. The royal family, fearing to fall 
into the hands of Napoleon, had abandoned the country, 
and arrived in Brazil in January, 1808. In 18 15 Brazil, 
though still subject to Portugal, was declared an inde- 
pendent kingdom, entitled to its own laws and adminis- 
tration. Its marvellous progress in the last fifty years 

* Vid. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition. 



A Magnificent Empire. 407 

has justified the expectations formed of its splendid 
future. 

The Spanish navigators had thus, in less than fifty 
years, made Spain the most magnificent empire on 
earth. It is no wonder that Charles V. and Philip II. 
were looked upon as little less than gods, were held in 
affectionate remembrance as the greatest kings that 
have ever sat on the throne of Spain, and were re- 
garded as the incarnation of Spanish greatness and 
dignity. The results flowing from the munificence of 
Isabella the Catholic had been incalculable. Nobody 
could have foreseen them, except perhaps the far-sighted 
queen herself, who united to moral grandeur and states- 
manship, a faith, hope, and charity, seldom blended in 
so eloquent a degree in any human character. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

REGENCY OF XIMENES. — REIGN OF CHARLES V, 
AND JUAN A. 

\ BRIEF interregnum in Spanish affairs now en- 
/-\ sued. Ximenes, holding the regency by the 
doubtful sanction of a prince who at the time of his 
death had no jurisdiction whatever over Castilian affairs, 
vigorously asserted himself, though opposed by Charles's 
ambassador, Adrian, Dean of Louvain. Letters from 
Charles soon came confirming the Cardinal's authority. 
Despite the repeated remonstrances of Ximenes and 
the council, Charles, though it was an indignity to his 
mother, and contrary to established usage, insisted on 
being proclaimed king. The cardinal at length yielded, 
and Charles's wish was carried out in Madrid and the 
provinces, though Aragon sturdily refused till he had 
made oath personally to respect the laws and liberties 
of the realm. 

Courage, vigor, strong physical force, strict economic 
arrangements, and bold schemes of reform, character- 
ized Ximenes' administration. "These are my creden- 
tials," said he, pointing to a park of artillery, when the 
discontented aristocracy came to him in a body, and 
demanded by what powers he held the government so 

408 



Death of Ximenes. 411 

absolutely. He organized the burgesses into regular 
military companies for police purposes and self-protec- 
tion, retrenched excessive salaries, took ample precau- 
tions for the preservation of the foreign conquests of 
Spain, extended the inquisition to the New World, and, 
by his assumption of sole authority in 15 17, intimidated 
the powerful grandees of Castile. 

The landing of Charles in the Asturias in September, 
15 17, fortunately got the octogenarian prelate out of a 
host of difficulties engendered by the extortion of the 
Flemings, the wide and general discontent at the ab- 
sence of the king, and the murmurs of the aristocracy. 
By a piece of matchless ingratitude, excusable perhaps 
on the score of youth (he was but seventeen) and evil 
counsel, Charles addressed a letter to Ximenes, telling 
him, after various complimentary preliminaries, that he 
might retire to his diocese. Ill as he was at the mo- 
ment, anxiety, disease, and emotion, added to this un- 
grateful announcement, were too much for his proud 
spirit ; Ximenes became mortally ill ; and full of devo- 
tion, contrition, and prayer, died (November 8, 15 17), 
saying, " In thee, Lord, have I trusted." 

The character of Ximenes excites awe rather than 
admiration. Cloister-bred, gloomy, and passionate, he 
governed despotically, he believed fanatically, he was 
reckless of difficulties, and fearless of all temporal 
sovereignties. Of great versatility of talent, deep dis- 
interestedness, a despiser rather than fearer of the 
squibs and lampoons poured pitilessly on him, irre- 
proachable in morals, full of a sort of lofty humility, 
avaricious of time to a degree, short of speech, addicted 
to theological arguments as his only amusement, people 



412 Reign of Charles V. 

saw in his vivid dark eyes, precise enunciation, rare 
mental endowments, and commanding though emaciated 
personality, a spirit born to rule, and to rule sovereignly. 

A few years of universal calm succeeded the peace 
of Troyon in 15 16, which occasioned an alliance be- 
tween Charles and Francis I. of France, and brought 
the bloody and tedious wars evoked by the league of 
Cambray to an end. 

A pompous entry into Valladolid in 15 18, followed 
by his proclamation as king by the Cortes — despite its 
respect for ancient forms and aversion to innovation — ' 
distinguished the beginning of the reign. Enveloped 
in a cloud of Netherlanders, Charles hardly had a 
chance to learn his own language, as Philip II., for 
opposite reasons, never completely acquired the Neth- 
erlandish. Leaving Castile disgusted with the venality 
of his followers and the nomination of William de 
Croy, nephew of the unpopular favorite Chievres, to 
the primacy of Spain, Charles made haste to hold the 
Cortes of Aragon. The Aragonese proved more intract- 
able than the Castilians ; he met violent opposition 
from them, though they at length conferred on him the 
title of king in conjunction with his mother. And here 
Charles began those requests for " donations " which 
soon became a regular part of his policy — money, 
money, he asked for everlastingly, and at all times, so 
that it came to be said that he visited Spain solely to 
gather ducats. 

On the 12th of January, 1519, died Maximilian em- 
peror of Germany, Charles's grandfather — a sudden 
explosion amid the profound peace then reigning in 
Europe, an irritant to the mortal rivalries of the young 



Rival Claimants. 413 

kings Francis and Charles, and a spark that kindled 
into a mighty conflagration all the combustible elements 
and crude ambitions at that time dormant through the 
continent. 

Maximilian had endeavored before his death to se- 
cure the imperial crown to his grandson, though obsti- 
nately opposed by the German princes — emperor 
" elect," only, as he himself was considered from his 
never having been crowned by the pope, — an indispen- 
sable ceremony. Almost at the very death-bed of 
Maximilian, the passions of Europe began to break 
forth. Two splendid rivals sprang forth to dispute the 
empire — both illustrious in youth, strength, brilliant 
aspiration, and unrivalled expectations. Charles looked 
upon his own elevation to the imperial throne, with 
sanguine hopes as grandson of Maximilian, as a prince 
of German nationality, and as a king able to repel with 
what, in the event of his election, would be irresistible 
force, the encroachments of the Turkish power under 
Selim II., then menacing Christendom with the whole 
of his power. 

Francis, on the other hand, had high hopes of con- 
vincing the diet of the expediency of now snubbing the 
princes of the house of Austria ; of showing the need 
of an able and mature sovereign in the present religious 
and political emergency ; of limiting the ambitious and 
comprehensive designs of a prince who, once elected 
emperor of Germany, would aspire to universal sover- 
eignty ; and of engaging a great mass of disciplined 
and valiant troops capable of coping with the invincible 
Selim. 

The diet of Frankfort, June, 15 19, after offering the 



414 Reign of Charles V. 

imperial crown to Frederic of Saxony, — a crown which 
had no charms for a prince of such pure magnanimity 
and disinterestedness, — conferred it unanimously, when 
Frederic had declined, on Charles. Discovering, how- 
ever, great jealousy of his extraordinary powers, the 
electoral college presented to Charles a " capitulation," 
or bill of rights, in which he was requested to sign a 
solemn recognition of the privileges and immunities of 
the electors, the princes of the empire, the cities and 
the whole Germanic confederation; which, signed by 
his representatives, was afterwards confirmed at his 
coronation by himself. 

At once vast projects of ambition began to dawn 
upon the newly elected emperor. Centuries seem to 
have gone by since the narrow times of Ferdinand and 
Isabella. The huge arena of European politics, sud- 
denly opening like an immeasurable amphitheatre 
before us, discloses the youthful emperor with lofty de- 
signs and great enterprises vividly at work before his 
expanding imagination. Spain at once took a step, 
from the confined limits of a petty Catholic power 
entangled in infinite self-conflict, out into the boundless 
area of a wider diplomacy, leaped to the forefront of the 
continental powers, and for four-score years exercised 
an astounding ascendency over them all. 

Charles's Spanish subjects, however, viewed his ele- 
vation very differently. They saw in it continual absence 
from home, government by proxy, waste of blood and 
treasure in the endless German and Italian wars, and perni- 
cious taxation to keep up all this foreign splendor. A civil 
war broke out in Valencia between nobles and people, 
a mutinous spirit showed itself in Castile, and the 



The Field of the Cloth of Gold. 415 

whole kingdom was more or less agitated. Leaving 
Adrian, now a cardinal, regent of Castile, Don Juan 
Launza, viceroy of Aragon, and Mendoza, count of 
Melito, viceroy of Valencia, Charles sailed from Coruna 
for the Low Countries, May 22, 1520. He was com- 
pelled to this move by the impatience of the imperial 
electors at the long interregnum between Maximilian's 
death and his own coronation, by the intestine commo- 
tions in his hereditary dominions of the Netherlands, 
by the rapid and alarming progress of Protestantism in 
Germany, and by the speed and vigor of the prepara- 
tions of the French king, who was now ready with his 
usual impetuosity to dispute any and everything in which 
Charles took interest, or to which he had a claim, — 
Naples, Milan, Charles's patrimonial domain of Bur- 
gundy, wrested from his ancestors by Louis XL, or the 
conquered kingdom of Navarre, — no matter what. 

The famous meeting of the Field of the Cloth of Gold, 
between Henry VIII. and Francis, took place in an 
open plain between Guisnes and Ardres, in 1520, — a 
meeting, which though resulting in personal impressions 
favorable to the chivalrous accomplishments and de- 
lightful manners of the French king, was soon counter- 
acted in influence by Charles's ally, VVolsey, and by a 
less gorgeous but practically more advantageous meet- 
ing with Charles himself, at Gravelines, a month after- 
wards. 

In the presence of a splendid and numerous assem- 
blage gathered at Aix-la-Chapelle, the young king was 
crowned with the crown of Charlemagne, emperor of 
Germany, October 23, 1520 — an event almost contem- 
porary with the accession of Solyman the Magnificent, 
to the sultanate of Turkey. 



416 Reign of Charles V. 

Never perhaps had Europe beheld such a group of 
brilliant sovereigns as at that moment riveted its atten- 
tion. Charles, Francis I., Leo X., Henry VIII., and 
Solyman, made an illustrious band — each endowed 
with special and splendid gifts, whether as diplomat, 
preux chevalier, connoisseur in art, possessor of deter- 
mined personal force, or lover of eastern magnificence. 

The diet of Worms, so celebrated for its discussions 
of Lutheranism, was called by Charles for January 6, 
152 1, — the first act of his eventful administration. 

When Charles arrived in Germany no change in es- 
tablished forms of worship had been introduced, no 
prince had as yet embraced Lutheranism ; the contro- 
versy as yet was a controversy of pamphlets and pas- 
sions, and no encroachments had been made upon the 
possessions or jurisdiction of the clergy. A profound 
impression of the beauty, truth, and sincerity of Luther's 
teachings, however, agitated Germany and impregnated 
the minds of the people with the liveliest apprehensions 
of approaching change. 

Since 15 17 the new movement to reform religion had 
been publicly propagated by Luther and his followers. 
Leo X.'s hapless love of splendor led him to that sale 
of indulgences which, under Tetzel, in Saxony, and other 
agencies in the rest of the empire, introduced enormous 
abuses, attracted the attention of the purer clergy as a 
bold and novel mode of replenishing church coffers, 
and brought them to consider it a practice equally sub- 
versive of faith and morals. The poor peasant of 
Eisleben, fed on the niceties and distinctions of a scho- 
lastic theology, by which men tried to refine themselves 
into heaven, found providentially a copy of the Bible 



Martin Luther. 417 

in his monastery library. He devoured its contents, and 
soon gained such reputation for sanctity and learning, 
that Frederic of Saxony called him to the chair of phil- 
osophy, in his newly founded university of Wittemberg, 
and then to the chair of theology in the same institu- 
tion. — But it will be useless to pursue the thousand-told 
tale of the reformation. Luther published ninety-five 
theses against indulgences; he was supported by the 
Auo-ustinian friars of his own monastic order, he was 
secretly encouraged by the elector of Saxony, he was 
regarded at first with condescending contempt and tol- 
eration by the court of Rome, then he was summoned 
in 15 18 to appear at Rome before Prierias, the inquisitor- 
general. In default of this, the papal legate, Cajetan, 
was empowered to try him for heresy in Germany, at 
Augsburg. His memorable intrepidity during that ex- 
amination, his flight from Augsburg, his appeal from the 
absolutism of Cajetan, who insisted inflexibly on a re- 
cantation, Luther's perilous situation, his appeal to a 
general council, the perpetual negotiations flying hither 
and thither between the parties to the con troversy, and 
the manner in which Luther, by the obstinacy and false- 
hood of its ministers, came from implicit confidence to 
absolute disbelief in the divine origin of the papal au- 
thority — all this need not be harped on. 

At last in 1520, a bull of excommunication was pub- 
lished against him ; anathemas thundered and adversa- 
ries exulted • but literally to no purpose. As well fling 
pins against a wall of adamant, as bulls, summonses, pen- 
alties, against this Teutonic impersonation of strength. 
Luther mercilessly pointed out the impiousness of the 
canon law ; he made bonfires of the bulls ; and far 



418 Reign of Charles V. 

from becoming the victim of abject ecclesiastical bigotry, 
laughed at, and despised it from his stronghold in the 
hearts of the people. The glorious light of justifica- 
tion by faith transfigured him ; he saw the uselessness 
of penances and pilgrimages, auricular confessions and 
purgatory, of saintly intercessions, celibacy, and the de- 
cisions of the schoolmen ; and not only he, but his 
contemporaries ; so that the ground in which Waldus, 
Wiclif, and Huss, had sown was now covered with a 
white harvest ready for the reaper. Luther then can 
only be regarded as the effective mouthpiece of the 
genera] European world, uttering with incomparable 
force, quaintness, and eloquence, what multitudes had 
at heart and cherished in the secret chambers of the 
soul. When a deacon guilty of murder might get off 
for twenty crowns, an abbot assassinate for three hun- 
dred livres, and the voluptuous lives of ecclesiastics ap- 
proach the bestialities of Petronius and the Lexicon 
Venereum, it was high time that a purifying blast should 
come and blow such scandals to the winds. The bene- 
fices of Germany lay at the mercy of joint-stock com- 
panies, who openly purchased and retailed them to the 
highest bidder. Reuchlin, Hutten. Erasmus, and Mel- 
ancthon, with the united force of wit, raillery, eloquence, 
and erudition, — men who had revived learning and men 
who had not, — gathered their strength at earlier or later 
moments of this splendid liberation of Christianity, and 
whether in speculative accord with it or not, directly or 
incidentally aided in its accomplishment. 

Charles, from motives of policy, perhaps, more than 
on the merits of the case, resolved to treat Luther with 
signal severity ; he was summoned to appear at Worms, 






^te-:^£ei 



S9^ 








THE PUERTA DEL SOL (GATE OF THE SUN), TOLEDO 



The Diet of Worms. 421 

in March, 152 t. He did appear under imperial safe- 
conduct, saying, " that he should do so though as many 
devils as there are tiles on the houses, were there com- 
bined against him ; " but as an obstinate and excommu- 
nicated criminal, he was deprived by edict, when 
neither threats nor prayers could prevail on him to re- 
tract his opinions, of his rights as a citizen, and even 
the personal protection of favorably disposed princes. 
He suddenly disappeared, and lay concealed at Wart- 
burg for nine months, under the protection of the elec- 
tor of Saxony. 

In 152 1, hostilities broke out in Navarre between the 
French and Spanish, but the former were defeated and 
driven out. A league was formed between Henry and 
Charles against Francis ; hostilities broke out in the 
Netherlands and Italy ; the pope declared against 
France, and a grand spectacular scene of war, tourna- 
ment, and negotiation ensued, further complicated by 
Leo's death in 1522, and the election of Adrian of 
Utrecht, Charles's old tutor, to the pontifical dignity. 
Solyman the Magnificent, made his famous descent 
on Rhodes in 1522, the seat of the Knights of St. John 
of Jerusalem ; and pitting two hundred thousand 
against five or six thousand soldiers and knights, com- 
manded by the heroic Villers de l'Isle Adam, brought 
it to an honorable capitulation after a siege of six 
months. The knights then received from the emperor 
as reparation the island of Malta, so celebrated after- 
wards for its resistance to the same enemy in Philip's 
time. 

By the victory of the nobles over the " comunidades,'' 
of Castile, at Villalar, April 23, 1522, — an event 



422 Reign of Charles V. 

which crushed for ages the communal liberties of Spain, 

— an unsuccessful insurrection was quelled and a new 
confirmation and extension of the powers of the crown 
resulted. 

The Castilians were acknowledged to have better un- 
derstood the principles of liberty than any other people in 
Europe ; to have acquired more liberal ideas of govern- 
ment and the rights and privileges of individuals ; and 
to have exhibited a political knowledge not attained 
even by the English till a century later. And yet by 
this fatal revolution, headed by Juan de Padilla, and 
suppressed as suddenly, all was risked and all was lost. 
The people and cortes subsided into that lethargy from 
which they were never roused except when the cortes 
abandoning the ancient and cautious form of examining 
and redressing grievances before they proceeded to 
grant supplies, was called upon for money and began 
to grant it without remonstrance. And from this fatal 
victory the privileges of the cities date their circum- 
scription and abolition, commerce begins to decline, the 
cortes ceased to be a genuine deliberative body, and, in 
the next reign, was almost entirely superseded by a sys- 
tem of councils established and multiplied by the poli- 
tic Philip. From Villalar, therefore, — from this great, 
popular insurrrection, protesting against tyranny and 
breathing through its " Holy Junta " such liberty as 
could hardly be expected from the haughtiest confed- 
eracy in the most enlightened times, — dates the extinct- 
ion of Spanish liberty. 

Disaffection followed in Valencia, Aragon, and Ma- 
jorca, and Charles's peninsula dominions for a moment 

— owing to the national antipathy, rivalries, and hostil- 



Pavia Besieged. 423 

ity, existing from time immemorial between the different 
kingdoms comprising Spain — seemed on the point of 
dissolution. By prudent and generous behavior towards 
the malecontents, however, — by punishing capitally 
scarcely twenty persons in Castile, after his arrival in 
Spain, by humoring with tact their national prejudices, 
by gentleness and conciliation, he easily pacified them ; 
and as they idolized the memory of Isabella, and loved 
and pitied the Lady Jane, so they began to twine their 
impressionable affections round him and to serve him 
with that love and loyalty seen, perhaps, nowhere in the 
world more profoundly and pathetically than in the 
peninsula. 

Charles, elated with recent successes in Italy, made 
his disastrous invasion of Provence (1524) and was re- 
pelled by the military skill, resources, and wisdom, of 
Francis. Delivered from this invasion Francis , — who 
seemed to be in a perpetual dance and exhilaration of 
happy animal spirits, — assisted by one of the most 
powerful and best-appointed armies ever raised in 
France, resolved upon the re-invasion of Milan, and, 
appointing Louise of Savoy, his mother, regent during 
his absence, he passed the Alps at Mont Cenis, spread 
consternation and disorder before him, embarrassed the 
imperialists by his brisk movements, and — fatal error 
for him — turned aside to lay siege to Pavia, (October 
1524), a town of great importance, but strong in forti- 
fications. 

Detained by the gallant defence of Pavia, and yet 
pursuing his design of taking it with a rashness and 
obstinacy hard to explain, sacrificing everything to his 
boast that he would take the city, and keenly alive to 



424 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

the ignominy of abandoning the enterprise ' unaccom- 
plished, he was shut in between the forces of Leyva, com- 
mandant at Pavia, and the forces of the imperial 
generals ; a battle took place, universal rout ensued, 
ten thousand men fell, and Francis himself, together 
with the king of Navarre, was taken prisoner. Perhaps 
the most memorable dispatch in history is that which 
Francis sent to his mother after the battle : " Madam, all 
is lost except our honor ! " 

His kingdom was saved by the address and foresight 
of Louise of Savoy. 

Instead of treating Francis with the magnanimity due a 
great prince, — instead of making one concentrated cam- 
paign against France and Italy before they had recovered 
from their speechless demoralization, Charles, as usual, 
took refuge in prolix negotiations, proposed offensive 
measures to Francis — restoration of Burgundy, sur- 
render of Dauphine and Provence, satisfaction of Hen- 
ry's claims on France, and renunciation of all French 
pretensions to Naples and Milan, — and sent the knightly 
Francis into ignoble captivity in the alcazar of Madrid, 
under the lynx eyes of Alarcon. 

After a rigorous imprisonment of more than a year, 
Francis was finally released from captivity by the treaty 
of Madrid, January 14, 1526. He left his eldest son, 
the dauphin, and his second son, the Due d' Orleans, as 
hostages for the performance of the stipulations of the 
treaty. 

It is to Charles's disgrace that he was driven to this 
treaty by urgent necessity; by Francis's threatening to 
resign his crown to the dauphin rather than be tor- 
tured into concessions unworthy of a king, and by his 



A League against Charles. 425 

own dread that if he refined his torment too far, and 
wrung and stung Francis's spirit by still more humili- 
ating conditions, he might outwit himself, and lose the 
magnificent ransom which he hoped to get from the 
French king. . 

In March, 1526, Charles's union with Isabella, of 
Portugal, a beautiful and accomplished princess, nearly 
related to the royal house of Spain, was solemnized 
with picturesque gayety and glory at Seville, — the 
loveliest of the Andalusian cities ; an event nearly con- 
temporaneous with the time when Francis, leaping into 
Lautrec's boat at Hendaya, crossed the river, sprang 
delightedly on the soil of France, and crying, " I am 
yet a king," galloped full speed to Bayonne. 

Disquietude reigned in Germany during this interval ; 
an insurrection of the peasants in Suabia broke out, 
followed by another in Thuringia led by Muncer, one 
of Luther's disciples, a communist and revolutionary 
of the worst and wildest type. The death of Muncer, 
who was condemned and executed as his crimes de- 
served, ended the war. but did not quench the smoul- 
dering religious enthusiasm upon which it was built, 
afterwards to flash up anew in a dangerous and san- 
guinary form. Luther's translation of the Bible, suc- 
ceeded by what was called his " incestuous marriage " 
with a noble nun Catherine a Boria, created great scandal 
in the ecclesiastical world, somewhat extenuated, to be 
sure, by his prudence and moderation during this peas- 
ant outbreak. 

Absolved by the pope from his oath not to take up 
arms against Charles, Francis made haste, on his de- 
liverance, to form a league with Henry, the Pope. Milan, 
and Venice against the swelling ambition of the empe- 



426 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

ror. Being required to perform what he had stipulated 
— especially the restoration of Burgundy — he replied 
by publishing his league with the other powers, thus 
rousing the bitterest indignation of Charles. 

In 1527 took place the sacking of Rome by the im- 
perialists, under the Constable de Bourbon — an event 
infamous to the last degree, disclaimed, though secretly 
rejoiced in, by Charles, and giving to the Catholic world 
a cruel shock. To avenge Pope Clement's double-deal- 
ing, Charles's general, Bourbon, set out with a muti- 
nous and savage crew of twenty-five thousand men of 
every nationality, with the intention of invading the 
papal territories. Immense booty allured the soldiers, 
rendered furious by lack of pay and by suffering; 
Clement, fluctuating, finally made a treaty with Lannoy, 
viceroy of Naples, disbanded his troops, and relied on 
providence and the other party to the treaty for a carry- 
ing out of its articles. Bourbon refused to recognize 
the new treaty, marched on and assaulted Rome, de- 
fended only by such troops as Clement could hurriedly 
gather, was slain himself in the assault, and his men, 
animated by frenzy, stormed, burned, ravaged, and vio- 
lated, in a way that roused indignation throughout Chris- 
tendom. Clement fled to the castle of St. Angelo, and 
Charles laughed in his sleeve. Starved out of his 
stronghold, the wretched Medici had to surrender, while 
the horror of Europe at the sacrilege of the Holy City 
in flames was assuaged by the devout spectacle of 
Charles appointing prayers and processions throughout 
all Spain for the recovery of the pope's liberty, putting 
himself and his court in mourning, and commanding the 
rejoicings over the birth of his son Philip, inauspicious 
in this moment of universal desolation (!), to cease. 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

REIGN OF CHARLES V. AND JUANA. 
[continued.] 

THE next eight years (1527-1535) were crowded 
with events, some of minor, some of immense 
importance. The large extent of Charles's dominions 
compelled frequent absences from Spain. His life was 
one of incessant travel from point to point and from 
diet to diet ; and the wonder is not that he should have 
abdicated in the prime of life, but that he should have 
held his tumultuous territories as long as he did. Pope 
followed pope ; treaty followed treaty ; war, negotiation, 
and reconciliation followed war, negotiation, and recon- 
ciliation ; and still the emperor, with matchless calm 
and persistency, gout-tormented as he was, exposed as 
he was to the infinite fatigues of horse-back travel over 
vast distances, held on, and with impassivity continued 
to weave the woof of his designs. The period under 
view embraced the formation of the confederacy be- 
tween Henry and Francis against Charles ; the recov- 
ery of their liberty by the Florentines, with the re-es- 
tablishment of their ancient popular form of govern- 
ment ; the invasion of Italy by the French and Vene- 
tians for the liberation of the pope and the Italian 
states; the liberation of Clement in 1527 on payment 

429 



430 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

of an enormous ransom ; the romantic cartel of defi- 
ance from Francis giving the emperor the lie in form 
for saying that he was a base violator of public faith 
and a stranger to the honor of a gentleman (the chal- 
lenge was accepted by Charles, though the duel did not 
take place) ; the retreat of the imperialists from Rome in 
1528, the revolt of the great Andrew Doria from France, 
with the recovery of her liberty by Genoa the same year, 
and the peace of Cambray, Aug. 5, 1529, between Charles 
and Francis, with terms advantageous to the emperor. 

Francis, impatient to release his sons from captivity 
in Spain, sacrificed by this treaty the fruits of nine 
successive campaigns, left Charles arbiter of the fate 
of Italy, removed a stigma from the Netherlands by 
abandoning his claims to the sovereignty of Flanders 
and Artois, and showed the fertility, caution, and 
sagacity of Charles in favorable contrast with his own 
heedlessness and impetuosity. Henry, anxious to ob- 
tain a divorce from Catharine of Aragon, owing to 
newly discovered scruples as to the legitimacy of his 
marriage with his brother's widow, and equally desirous 
to gain Clement's consent to it, acquiesced in the treaty. 
Then the emperor, landing at Genoa, appeared in Italy 
with the pomp and power of a conqueror, winning all 
by his courtesy and affability. He re-established the 
authority of the Medici at Florence, appointed the diet 
of Speyerfor March 15, 1529, and enjoined those states 
of the empire which had hitherto obeyed the. decree 
issued against Luther at Worms in 1524 to persevere in 
the observation of it, while prohibiting further religious 
innovations. The name Protestant was said first to 
have been given to the band of illustrious princes and 



The Augsburg Confession,, 431 

cities that entered a protest against this decree passed 
by a majority of voices at the diet — Elector of Saxony, 
Marquis of Brandenburg, Landgrave of Hesse, Duke 
of Lunenburg, Prince of Anhalt, and deputies from 
fourteen imperial cities. 

On March 22, 1530, a diet of the empire was held 
at Augsburg, during which Melancthon, the ethereal- 
minded scholar, drew up the famous Augsburg Confes- 
sion of Faith, expressing with moderation and soberness 
the precise tenets of the Protestant party. A severe 
decree, condemning most of the heretical opinions of 
this confession, was fulminated by the popish party ; a 
severity which compelled the Protestant states, alarmed 
at the prospect of rigorous persecution, and convinced 
of their destruction having been determined upon, to 
enter into a league of mutual defence against all 
aggressors, at Smalkalde, December 22, 1530. 

By firmness in adhering to their opinions, by the 
unanimity with which they pushed all their pretensions, 
and by their wisdom in seizing a happy conjuncture 
when the emperor was embarrassed on one side by the 
precarious peace with France, and on the other by the 
hostile movements of Solyman, they managed to extort 
from Charles at Nuremberg (1531), terms which virtu- 
ally amounted to toleration of Protestantism. Solyman 
was compelled to retreat from Hungary. Charles thus 
released, set out to re-visit Spain by way of Italy, and 
arrived in Barcelona in 1533. 

The famous enterprise of the Spaniards against the 
pirates of Barbary, in 1535, aroused universal attention, 
spread Charles's fame as the chief prince in Christen- 
dom everywhere, and with the defeat of the corsair 



432 Reign of Charles V. and Jit ana. 

Barbarossa's army and the surrender of Tunis, momen- 
tarily extinguished the system of piracy with which the 
Mediterranean was afflicted. 

In 1538, at Nice, was concluded a truce of ten years, 
between Charles and Francis — a result accomplished 
by the zeal and ingenuity of the venerable pontiff Paul, 
and doubtless pleasing to Charles, after his second 
luckless invasion of Provence in 1536. An interview 
took place between the rivals, spiced with piquant rec- 
ollections, perhaps, considering the terms on which they 
had been for twenty years. They had mutually given 
and taken the lie; Charles had denounced Francis as 
destitute of honor, Francis had accused Charles of 
being accessory to the recent death of the dauphin, and 
injuries without number reciprocally inflicted or endured 
were in the memory of each. And yet they romanti- 
cally rushed into each other's arms like two school-boys, 
and showed the warmest demonstrations of esteem and 
affection on both sides. 

In 1539, on the accession of Henry to the electorate 
of Saxony — a prince devotedly attached to Protestant- 
ism — that religion became established in every part of 
Saxony. 

The expenses of Charles's military undertakings now 
caused Spain to groan under a taxation unknown in its 
history. He dismissed the Cortes of Castile at Toledo 
in 1539 with great acrimony because it ventured to ex- 
postulate with his continual entanglement in European 
affairs, the burdens entailed upon the people in conse- 
quence, and the threatened ruin of public credit and 
private resources. Henceforth nobles and prelates 
were not called to the Cortes, under pretence that those 



lllllillllB 1 - : t l'i- \a • 




The Order of Jesuits. 435 

who were exempt from taxation had no right to impose 
it ; and the Cortes was then limited to thirty-six repre- 
sentatives from eighteen cities. The nobility, in crush- 
ing the commons and upholding the royal prerogative 
at Villalar, in 1522, had virtually extinguished their own 
body, ill-compensated by such paltry privileges as wear- 
ing a hat in the king's presence, donning anniversary 
robes, rights of petty jurisdiction, and maintenance of 
miraculously precise etiquette. 

The insurrection of Ghent in 1536, caused by her 
citizens refusing to pay their quota to the French war, 
was crushed by Charles with relentless rigor, and an 
example of severity set before his other subjects of the 
Netherlands that dared to set themselves in the way of 
his measures. 

The year 1540, is rendered noticeable by the estab- 
lishment of the order of Jesuits. The soldier-monk 
Loyola, at length removing the pope's scruples against 
the formation of a new order by promising to add to 
the three monastic vows of poverty, chastity, and mon- 
astic obedience, that of special obedience to the pope, 
— binding his followers to abject submission to the inte- 
rests of religion, — obtained Paul's authorization to insti- 
tute this world-wide organization. A missionary order 
under military organization — a religious order devoted 
to worldly affairs, education, and the conquest of per- 
sons of rank and intelligence, a body of men whose 
watchword was implicit and absolute obedience to the 
mandate of their general, no matter on what errand 
bent, an immense bureau of secret intelligence from 
every quarter of the globe, a scheme soon furnishing 
subtle spiritual guides to nearly all the monarchs in 



436 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

Europe and participating in every revolution and every 
intrigue pro glorid fidei, — their wealth, their special 
trading facilities with foreign countries, granted by the 
court of Rome, their possessions in every country — 
sometimes with sovereign sway — and their character- 
istic and pernicious attachment to the order first and 
the order last — showed, before the end of the sixteenth 
century, that mighty progress which, though illustrated 
by eminence in literature, art, and education, was soon 
seen to be the fertile source of innumerable calamities 
to civil and political society. Occult ambition, reckless 
selfishness, insatiable intrigue, caused their ruin; and 
though they did not exercise any considerable influence 
in Charles's time, the order began their career at that 
epoch, and experienced a check from his sagacious and 
far-seeing spirit. 

Another expedition to Africa against Algiers, in 15 41, 
going down in an eclipse of disaster, as the first had 
been full of glory, now called Charles away. 

The emperor's great qualities came out conspicuously 
in his reverses ; self-denial, greatness of soul in defeat, 
constancy, humanity, showed that he was not wholly 
mastered by selfishness and self-interest. 

The immense pageant of Charles's reign was now 
increased by the presence of Maurice of Saxony, who, 
in 1 541, succeeded his father Henry in that part of 
Saxony which belonged to the Albertine branch of the 
Saxon family ; a knightly figure ; brilliant^ graceful, 
daring ; a zealous Protestant, a great general, a paladin 
of romance for costly and insinuating accomplishments ; 
and all this at twenty. Francis, tired of the truce, re- 
newed hostilities in 1542 with five fine armies, but made 
peace at Crespy in 1544. 



Death of Martin Luther. 437 

The council of Trent was summoned to meet in 1545, 
soon after the peace of Crespy, but the Protestants, with 
the exception of Maurice, who courted favor with the 
emperor, would have nothing to do with it. 

An inflammation of the stomach carried off the great 
Luther in 1541. 

The reformer left behind a reputation for dauntless 
intrepidity, zeal for truth, purity and austerity of man- 
ners, humor, passionate temper, and prejudice, not min- 
gled in equal degree in the character of any of his 
contemporaries. Indelicacy, culpable acrimony of 
statement, irascibility, and vanity, cast a shade on one 
side of the picture, and tell us that Luther was human. 
But a rugged grandeur of soul, an infinitely subtle spirit 
of mirth, the warbling of a melodious gift for poetry, a 
Homeric sense of the ridiculous, a generous toleration 
for human fraility, and a pleasant garrulousness as of 
some rough old man talking to his children, show us 
in him glimpses of a lovableness and simplicity allied 
to the sweetest tendencies of our nature. 

The next two years, saw the commencement of hos- 
tilities against the Protestants. Charles concluded a 
truce with Solyman, gained over Maurice and other 
princes in Germany, formed a treaty with the pope to 
check the growth of Henry, and while endeavoring to 
conceal his intentions from the Protestants, so alarmed 
them that, after gigantic efforts, they were enabled to 
take the field with forces superior to his own, and even 
to overawe the emperor. The elector of Saxony, the 
landgrave of Hesse, the duke of Wurtemberg, the princes 
of Anhalt, and the cities of Augsburg, Ulm, and Strass- 
burg, were the principal contributors to this great ar- 



438 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

mament of seventy thousand foot and fifteen thousand 
horse. But the host fell asunder at the critical moment ; 
one part of it after another submitted ; and, finally, by 
the battle of Miihlberg, in 1547, Charles defeated and 
took prisoner the elector of Saxony. He forced him 
with ungenerous rigor to surrender the electorate and 
remain a perpetual prisoner; Maurice was put in pos- 
session of his dominions as his reward for deserting 
the Protestant cause ; and the landgrave of Hesse, 
Maurice's father-in-law, being made the victim of an 
infamous piece of perfidy on Charles's part, was de- 
tained a prisoner under a Spanish guard. 

The emperor's indecent treatment of two of the 
greatest princes of Germany provoked murmurs long 
and loud. But assuming the arrogant and inflexible 
tone of a conqueror, he began to dictate despotically 
and greatly to alarm a people habituated during centu- 
ries to consider the imperial authority as neither exten- 
sive nor formidable. Charles could act all the more 
confidently, as Francis, his antagonist during twenty- 
eight years, — the gay, the spiritual, the captivating, the 
accomplished, — was now no more. 

The sparkling volatility of Francis, his absolute au- 
thority within his own compact dominions, his enthu- 
siastic and adventurous temperament, his easily-kindled 
affections, his love of poetry and painting, were a direct 
counterbalance to Charles's length of deliberation, his 
bull-dog-like obstinacy, his sway over a large and loose 
confederation, perpetually angry, perpetually in fermen- 
tation, and his cautious utilization of his conquests. 
We may admire Charles, but Francis we cannot help 
loving. An irrepressible boyishness, a dash, a gal- 



" *^ ^ -I 




INTERIOR OF SAN JUAN DE LOS REYES, TOLEDO 



A Bad Impression. 441 

Iantry, unknown to his sober rival, endear him to us, 
and make us forgive or forget his numerous faults. 

Charles now journeyed into the Low Countries to re- 
ceive and have his son Philip, now twenty-one, recog- 
nized as heir-apparent of the Netherlands. Philip, 
though welcomed and entertained with the ancient 
splendor of Brabant, did not make a good impression. 
His youth seemed to have no bloom, no brilliance, no 
benignity, already his haughty reserve and solemn 
frown overcast the sunshiny disposition of the Nether- 
landers, and overawed their frank and joyous temper- 
ament, and horoscopes most unfavorable to his future 
in the Low Countries were already cast by the impres- 
sionable imaginations of the Flemings. 

Prince Maurice of Saxony, who had all along been 
profoundly double-dealing with the emperor, suddenly, 
after the capitulation of the hitherto unreduced Magde- 
burg, in 155 1, threw off the mask, and revealed to the 
astounded despot his own vast schemes of ambition. 
In his-manifesto of 1552, justifying his conduct, he ex- 
poses his reasons for now taking up arms against the 
emperor, who had hitherto regarded him as one of his 
strongest allies, — -that he might assure the Protestants 
in the practice of their religion, maintain the laws and 
constitution of the empire, save Germany from a 
despotism, and deliver the landgrave of Hesse from 
the miseries of a long and unjust imprisonment- 
Being powerfully aided by Henry II., of France, he 
advanced with eagle swiftness upon the imperialist 
forces at Innsbruck, compelled the emperor to rly in 
confusion from the place, broke up the council, which 
had again returned to Trent from Bologna, in wildest 
consternation, and by the vigor and alertness of his 



442 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

operations forced the distressed and embarrassed mon- 
arch to the celebrated Peace of Religion at Passau, 
August 2, 1552. 

This peace overthrew with a breath the monstrous 
fabric of Charles's ambition, annulled all his regulations 
concerning religion, scattered to the winds his darling 
scheme of procuring the election of Philip as his suc- 
cessor on the imperial throne, and triumphantly vindi- 
cated and established Protestantism. Maurice's pro- 
found dissimulation was glorified and transfigured into 
providential foresight ; and the historian's concluding 
reflection on the subject is, " that wonderfully doth the 
wisdom of God superintend and regulate the caprice 
of human passions, and render them subservient towards 
the accomplishment of his own purpose ! " 

Little remains to be said of the three concluding years 
of Charles's long and stormy reign, unless we would 
repeat the perpetual story of hostility against France — 
now his favorite passion ; tumults in various parts of 
his widely-extended territories, and never-ending difii- 
culties with Italy. The landgrave of Hesse recovered 
his freedom and was reinstated in his dominions, and 
the degraded elector of Saxony was set at liberty by 
the emperor. War was again renewed with France for 
the recovery of Metz, Toul, and Verdun, lately won by 
the French; but the deluges of rain and snow, bitter 
winter weather, starvation, and the gallant Duke of 
Guise brought about the utter ruin of the imperial army 
with the loss of thirty thousand men. 

This disastrous year (1552), was further signalized 
by unfortunate occurrences in Italy, the revolt of Sien- 
na, and the descent of the Turks on the kingdom of 



An Extraordinary Genius. 443 

Naples, where they cast anchor in the very harbor of 
the metropolis, and diffused terror through Italy. The 
turbulence of Albert of Brandenburg, who kindled a 
new war in Germany, and united the most powerful 
princes in the land (headed by Maurice) against himself, 
threw the vast confederation into a tremor. In the bat- 
tle of Sieverhausen, in Lunenburg, he was attacked and 
routed ; but the Germanic league experienced an irrepar- 
able loss in the death of Maurice, who fell in this bat- 
tle, aged thirty-two. 

An extraordinary genius ; ambitious, grossly unjust 
in stealing his kinsman's dominions, full of prudence 
and vigor when his youth suggested immaturity and 
recklessness, wonderfully alert and forgiving where his 
own interests were concerned, a profound intriguer, an 
intricate schemer, a sturdy Protestant , the most para- 
doxical elements combined in Prince Maurice's character 
and made him at once universally admired and univer- 
sally feared. 

The decline of the " Star of Austria " was observ- 
able also in Hungary, where the emperor's brother 
Ferdinand was compelled to abandon Transylvania to 
Isabella, late queen of Hungary, and the Turks. To 
counteract apparently the decay of his prestige, a mar- 
riage was projected between Charles's son Philip, now 
a widower, and Mary of England, — a marriage origi- 
nally arranged for Charles himself It seemed, however. 
Philip's fate to marry princesses originally destined for 
somebody else ; for no less than three out of his four 
wives were thus selected, one for his father and two for 
his son, Don Carlos. 

The marriage treaty was signed in 1554 and gave to 



444 Reign of Charles V. and Jaana. 

Philip the empty title of king of England. Discontent 
and apprehension were general in England at so close 
a connection with the most Catholic of European coun- 
tries ; justified to a great extent, for, after the stately 
wedding ceremonies in 1554, Mary took advantage of 
Wyatt's insurrection to effect measures for the extirpa- 
tion of Protestantism in her kingdom. 

Fitful campaigns in Picardy against Henry of France, 
and in Piedmont under the duke of Alva, were carried 
on with varying event. The conspiracy to deliver Metz 
into the hands of the imperialists signally miscarried. 
Languid negotiations for peace between the potentates 
were labored upon with piety and humanity by Cardi- 
nal Pole ; but as neither would relinquish his extrava- 
gant demands, they proved abortive. 

The "recess of Augsburg," in 1555, a scheme of 
pacification between the Papists and Protestants of 
Germany, gave the foundation to the subsequent reli- 
gious peace and toleration in that country — a scheme 
essential to their mutual safety and tranquillity. Curi- 
ously enough, Calvin's and Zwingle's followers were 
excluded from this arrangement ; only those adhering 
to the Confession of Augsburg receiving the benefit of 
it; and not till the treaty of Westphalia did they ac- 
quire legal authorization to enjoy equal privileges with 
he Lutherans. 

An event long conceived, long fore-shadowed, — the 
surrender of his hereditary dominions to Philip, and his 
own retirement from the brilliant but agitated arena of 
political life, — was now put into execution by Charles. 

Elected to the imperial crown in 15 19, when Spain 
under Ferdinand and Isabella had become consolidated, 



Abdication of Charles V. 445 

and had taken its place in the hierarchy of the great 
European commonwealth — the real sovereign of Mexico, 
of Peru, of far-distant dependencies in the New World 
and the Old, of Franche-Comte', Spain, and the Nether- 
lands, of Naples and Sicily — his life had been one of 
ceaseless activity, vicissitude, and success. He had 
crushed the liberties of the Spanish people at Villalar 
in the war of the communities. He had witnessed and 
vigorously co-operated — on the wrong side — in the 
great battle for religious liberty and Protestantism. He 
had rolled back the tide of Turkish conquest in his 
early life. He had been the champion of Christianity 
in Tunis and Algiers. He had traversed Italy, Spain, 
Flanders, France, England, and Germany, forty times, 
bent on expeditions of war or peace. He had carried 
on a prolonged and sanguinary conflict with his brother- 
in-law, Francis I. He had waged determined war on 
the Lutheran princes of Germany. He had struggled 
in vain against Maurice and had seen his projects anni- 
hilated by the peace of Passau. And now, prema- 
turely exhausted at fifty-six, racked since his thirtieth 
year by excruciating gout, disabled so that he had to be 
carried about in a litter and could not or would not sign 
letters or papers for months ; overshadowed by consti- 
tutional melancholy and in deep mourning for the re- 
cent death of his mother Juana ; listening to supersti- 
tious voices calling him away, and seeing a fit successor 
in his thoroughly trained son Philip, now twenty nine, 
Charles hastened to make arrangements by which he 
could fittingly and impressively withdraw into the 
monastery of Yuste and leave forever the tumultuous 
drama of the world. 



446 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

The closing scene of his sovereignty at Brussels, 
October 25, 1555, when in the sumptuous chateau of 
the capital, and surrounded by the gorgeous ceremonial 
of the antique Burgundian court, he ceded to his son the 
realm of Flanders, forms a transcendent picture wor- 
thy of the commemorative pencil of Paul Veronese. 
Breathless attention reigned throughout the assembly ; 
deep emotion was evoked by the pathos and lofty self- 
abnegation of the emperor's tone ; Charles spoke with 
a simplicity and eloquence that touched all hearts ; and 
his parting admonition, delivered in broken accents to 
his son, who stood by in an attitude of deep respect, 
brought them to tears. " Fear God, live justly, respect 
the laws ■ above all, cherish the interests of religion." 

On the 1 6th of January, 1556, he formally ceded to 
Philip the sovereignty of Castile, Aragon, and their 
dependencies, having, the October previous, thrown 
about his neck the sparkling jewel of the grandmaster- 
ship of the Golden Fleece. 

The emperor now passed into Spain accompanied 
by the queens of Hungary and France, his sisters, and 
one hundred and fifty of his household as special es- 
cort ; and after a few months' sojourn in various parts 
of the realm, where he was affectionately welcomed, he 
journeyed on like a pilgrim, to the city of his rest, 
toward the Hieronymite monastery which he had chosen 
for his hermitage. There he settled into a life of med- 
itation, austerity, penitence, and prayer; mingling his 
monkish practices, however, with characteristic amuse- 
ments, sensual indulgences, and comprehensive corre- 
spondence with his agents abroad. He could not give 
up the world entirely, but kept up unfailing interest in 
its affairs. 







^v>-|f»r^ 



I J 




PEASANT OF ALCOY. 



Charles V. at Yuste. 449 

Yuste was a lovely spot ; high, pure-aired, wrapped 
in lemon and myrtle gardens, lifted into an atmosphere 
serene and sweet above the teeming plains that washed 
its base like a sea ; and there, amid its tranquil luxuri- 
ance, sunny groves, and sacred employments, the tired 
emperor found space for yet a few years of peaceful 
existence. Here, amid the hills of Estremadura, he 
was enabled to carry out his plans of devoting himself 
to the salvation of his soul — a plan which his consort, 
the Empress Isabella, had likewise conceived, but which 
she died too early to execute. . 

Expiating the crimes, mistakes, and misunderstand- 
ings of a reign of forty years unparalleled for great 
issues and protracted struggles, required, however, more 
than mere self-consecration to prayer and holy medita- 
tion. Let us seize the opportunity offered by the lull 
to attempt a concise portrayal, hitherto impossible, of 
Charles's personal traits, habits, and surroundings. 

The monastery had been fitted up with some archi- 
tectural elegance, richly but simply furnished, and 
guarded against the damps so fatal to his gouty consti- 
tution. Here he displayed in full force his passion for 
watches, clocks, and mechanical contrivances of all 
sorts ; he was served on silver and surrounded by luxu- 
rious tapestries ; eider-down and ermine lined his six- 
teen robes of silk and velvet, and curiously constructed 
arm-chairs supported his tormented limbs. The "Gloria" 
of Titian hung in one of his rooms, accompanied by a 
small but exquisite group of masterpieces from the 
same inimitable fingers. He was as fond of horticul- 
ture as Diocletian, and he loved to sit and meditate 
under his walnuts and chestnuts. Though renowned 



450 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

for horsemanship and all manly exercises in his prime, 
he could not bestride now even an Andalusian jennet. 
Some fifty persons, mostly Flemish gentlemen, whose 
language and nationality he devotedly loved, surrounded 
him as his retinue. Though a recluse at Yuste, he re- 
mained emperor for over a year after his arrival there, 
formally resigning the empire into the hands of the 
diet of Frankfort early in 1558. 

He spent his surplus time in mass-going, carving 
wood (of which he was very fond), arguing at length 
on scientific questions with the scholar Van Male, gen- 
tleman of the bed-chamber, listening to the eloquent 
harangues of the Hieronymite brethren, discussing the- 
ology after dinner with them ; and in severe Lenten 
fasts and self-flagellations. 

A musical voice was another of Charles's gifts, and a 
false note from any of the less fastidiously trained 
monks would make him swear as in his old campaigning 
clays. He was an ingenious mechanician, and his con- 
trivances kept the simple monks in an astonishment 
that made them dread him as a necromancer. Being 
unable to make any of his numerous time-pieces keep 
exactly the same time, it is said that he exclaimed on 
the folly of attempting to make people think alike in 
religious matters. He admitted visitors ; the queens of 
Hungary and France came to see him ; he had the con- 
solation of retaining in his neighborhood, though given 
out as the son of his major-domo Quixada, his own nat- 
ural son, the spirited Don Juan of Austria ; he con- 
ferred with military men and strangers from abroad ; 
and he was in perpetual communication with Philip. 
He lamented the loss of Calais and rejoiced over the 



Charles V. Declines. 



451 



victory of St. Quentin ; he took deep interest in 
Philip's financial regulations, and varied his conventual 
life in a manner at first most beneficial to his health. 
His sisters he loved tenderly, and the death of Eleanor, 
queen dowager of France and Portugal, in 1558, gave 
him a deep shock. He thundered from his mountain 
retreat against heresy, and zealously encouraged the 




Charles V. 



inquisition in its development. Monastic life intensified 
his bigotry, while it could not check his appetites or his 
relish for eel-pie and capons. His health, however, 
declined ; he is said to have gone through the singular 
ceremony of having funeral obsequies performed over 
himself in the chapel, which was hung with black and 



452 Reign of Charles V. and Juana. 

blazed with innumerable wax-lights ; and he developed 
a fantastic inclination for dismal rites and the lugubrious 
and dramatic side of church spectacles. In August, 
alarming symptoms showed themselves ; he began to 
pass much time in rapt contemplation before the beau- 
tiful features of his dead wife, and before Titian's 
Agony in the garden ; and he executed a codicil to his 
will, in which he conjured Philip to exterminate every 
heretic in his dominions and to cherish the Inquisition. 
With the holy taper clasped in one hand and the cru- 
cifix in the other, fixing his dying eyes on the sacred 
symbol, while the archbishop of Toledo repeated the De 
Prqfundis. he expired on the 21st of September, 1558, 
in the fifty-ninth very of his age. Thus the empire of 
the Caesars, more vast in extent, and more absolutely 
held than since the days of Charlemagne, was left 
desolate. 



THE HABSBURGS AND BOURBONS. 



Including Bourbon Princes In Parma and Two Sicilies. 



Maria, duu. of John III of Portugal. 

nfHenrv Y1II of Knsrland. 

(3) = Elizabeth, dau. of Henry II of France. 

(4) = Anne, dau. of Emp. Maximilian II. 



» Recognized heir of Charles 1 1 of Spain until his death 
/' Rival claimants ol Spain:, He. I li.nl,-. II, the elde, I. 



, the elder brother of each re. 

torcd to Parma On death of Maria Louisa, 



PHILIP III, 
1598-1621. 



.Line 



PHILIP IV, 

1621-1655. 



Isabella = Albert, son of Einp. 
ob. s. p. 1633. Maximilian II. 
Sovereigns of the Netherlands. 



.lizabeth, dau. of Henry IV, of Fr: 
(2) =f Maria. 



■t Theresa = (,) Emp. Leopold l,(3)T 

ob. 1705- L 

ayMaria Antonia. Joseph I, ob. 1711. 



Louis, D. of Burgundy. 



PHILIP Vb 



7245(1 ) = Maria Louisa, 
rown, 1725; of Savoy. 

746. (2) =f Isabella Fame: 



Louisa, dau. of = LOUIS, 1724-1725, FERDINAND VI, = Magdalen, ,1 
Regent Orleans. ob. s. p. 1746-1759, ob. s. p. Joh " 



uidalcn, dau. of CHARLES'lII,TMaria Amelia, dau. of Frederick Maria Anna = Joseph, ol Portugal. Pl'llLlP, oh. 1765. yMaria Louisa, dau. ol 

n V, of Portugal. I7S9->7SS. Augustus II, of Saxony. I Louis X V, of France. 




Charles =j= M 



CHAPTER XIX. 
SPAIN UNDER PHILIP II. 

PHILIP, as we have seen, was already twenty-nine 
when the helm of government passed into his 
hands. He was born at Valladolid, May 21, 1527. 

In 1528 the royal baby had bonfires and illuminations 
lighted for him, bull-fights and tournaments of reeds 
fought in his honor, and chivalrous and romantic cere- 
monies performed, all in celebration of his recognition 
by the Castilian cortes, as rightful heir to this unrivalled 
empire. Two functionaries were entrusted with his 
education — the complaisant Juan Martinez Siliceo, an 
humble but scholastically-trained doctor of Salamanca, 
and Don Juan de Zufiiga. Ancient languages, French, 
Italian, mathematics, architecture, painting, and sculp- 
ture, for some of which Philip showed peculiar aptitude, 
were taught him by Siliceo. A knowledge of tilting 
and tourneying, fencing, riding, and other invigorating 
accomplishments, together with the duties belonging to 
his royal station, was imparted by the grandee Zuniga. 

Twelve years after her marriage with Charles, Isa- 
bella died ; and thus Philip was bereft of his mother's 
high and generous teachings. Surrounded as he was 
from the beginning, however, by statesmen of wisdom 

455 



456 Spain under Philip II 

and experience, he soon became familiar with govern- 
ment and its workings, and what buoyancy he may have 
had was crushed out of him by the serious and respon- 
sible nature of the position which he occupied. The 
emperor being almost continually absent, and visiting 
Spain only when his exchequer needed replenishing, 
Philip was thrust forward into great prominence ; was 
intrusted with the regency under a council consisting 
of Alva, Cardinal Tavera, and Cobos, and almost from 
the beginning was bidden by his father to depend on 
nobody but himself, to avoid being governed by the 
grandees, and in his perplexities lean exclusively on his 
Maker. Philip's character thus ripened early into a 
firm, granite-hard, cautious, and calculating texture, 
which afforded his father untold satisfaction, and gave 
him hopes that the empire would lose nothing in force 
when it had to be transmitted to his son. His only 
child by his first wife, Maria of Portugal, married in 
1543, and dead in less than two years, was Don Carlos, 
of evil and pathetic memory. 

In the autumn of 1548 Philip, having by his father's 
command temporarily surrendered the regency into the 
hands of Maximilian, son of his uncle Ferdinand, and 
his sister Maria, Maximilian's wife, set out with a bril- 
liant retinue for Flanders, on a visit to his father. His 
household, very different from the stately yet simple 
customs of his ancestors, was now thronged with cere- 
monious figures, gathered from the usages and traditions 
of Burgundy. Even his bed-chamber and his table 
were served by men of rank ; there were splendid state 
dinners in public ; minstrels, musicians, grandees of the 
purest water as chamberlains, captain of the body-guard 



Philip marries Mary. 457 

and major-domo. Everything moved to a resplendent 
ceremonial, in cadence as it were, accompanied by an 
elegant hospitality and profusion. 

Philip traversed Genoa, the battle-field of Pavia, 
laden for him with glorious souvenirs of Spanish valor ; 
Milan, where we see him dancing, with light and agile 
figure ; Tyrol, Heidelberg, and Flanders ; receiving with 
gracious condescension the civilities everywhere heaped 
upon him, especially, we may imagine, the goblets of 
golden ducats with which many cities accompanied 
their complimentary addresses. His personality — blue 
eyes, yellow hair and beard, slight, symmetric figure, 
Austrian lip, and ceremonious demeanor — was not 
unpleasing or unintellectual. His tastes were too re- 
served and quiet, however, to recommend him to the 
boisterous Netherlanders. 

After presenting himself in the Low Countries, taking 
long and careful lessons in public affairs and the art of 
government in the cabinet of his father, accompanying 
Charles to the diet of Augsburg in 1550, where his effort to 
procure Philip's election as king of the Romans proved 
abortive, Philip withdrew from the importunate festivi- 
ties of the Flemings, their masques, dances, and uproar- 
ious mirth, and stole like a sombre shadow out of all 
this sunshine back to Barcelona in 1551. Here at least 
he felt himself at home among a people, as has been 
said, with the exception of the Jews, more distinguished 
than any other for their intense spirit of nationality. 

Philip's union with Mary of England in 1554 has 
already been incidentally spoken of. Betrothed origi- 
nally to the emperor, Mary was now courted by him for 
his son. After some coquetry hardly natural in a wo- 



458 Spain under Philip II 

man of thirty-six, Mary yielded ; and it was said of her 
marriage treaty, that it looked more like a defence 
against an enemy than a marriage compact, so cau- 
tiously guarded were its stipulations. 

England, under the reign of this happy pair, was 
restored to the communion of the Roman Catholic 
Church — a consummation accompanied by abundant 
clouds of incense from Smithfield market-place. In the 
course of time Mary, imagining herself near her con- 
finement, was saluted with Te Deums, bell-ringings, and 
bonfires; "but," quaintly remarks Holinshed, "in the 
end appeared neither young maister nor young mistress 
that any man to this day can hear of ! " 

Charles's proposed abdication in 1555 necessitated 
Philip's absence from England j so, accompanied by a 
bright troop of English and Castilian grandees, he 
went over to the Flemish capital in great state, arriving 
in September. 

We have described in faint outlines the thrilling 
scene of Charles's abdication in Brussels — leaving to 
Philip such an empire as the Caesars had never dreamed 
of. Family alliances, inheritance, and the Spanish nav- 
igators had all but compassed the globe to bestow their 
richest gifts prodigally on this only son of a great king \ 
a knight whose lady was Catholicism, for Philip was 
temporally the mightiest of Catholic potentates, and it 
was his highest ambition to devote himself Christianly 
and humbly to the service of his church. 

The truce of Vaucelles, made between Charles and 
Henry II., in 1556, was now violated by Henry, who was 
absolved from his oath by Paul IV., the bitter enemy 
of Philip. The complaisant theologians of Salamanca, 



Siege of St. Quentin. 459 

Alcala, and Valladoiid, justified Philip in taking up 
arms against the pope ; accordingly he sent word to his 
lieutenant, the Duke of Alva, to take measures for the 
protection of Naples, menaced by his holiness. 

The first three years of Philip's reign were distin- 
guished by remarkable successes. 

Italy proved the " grave of France." The Duke of 
Guise, who commanded the French, retired with his 
soldiers, scattered and crestfallen, across the Alps. 
Paul, who had called in the aid of the French, said that 
they might easily be dislodged, but that " the Spaniards 
were like dog-grass, which is sure to strike root wherever 
it is cast." 

Emanuel Philibert of Savoy, a tried general, com- 
manded Philip's forces in France, which, exclusive of 
the English, amounted to thirty-five thousand foot, 
twelve thousand horse, and a fine train of artillery. 
The most brilliant action of the war was the siege of 
St. Quentin, an ancient town on the frontier of Picardy, 
held by Gaspard de Coligny, the Protestant martyr of 
St. Bartholomew. Pure, austere, intrepid, and full of 
resource, Coligny was just the man to command a des- 
perate position like that of this dilapidated, river-gir- 
dled city. Though Montmorency hastened to his help 
with the chivalry of France, the lilies of France were 
no match for the combined battalions of Spain, Flan- 
ders, and England. 

Philip, who visited the place the day of the great bat- 
tle of St. Quentin, in 1557, did not follow up his victory 
and march on Paris, preferring to push the siege of the 
town by means of battering-trains, mines, and starva- 
tion. 



460 Spain under Philip II 

After nearly a month's siege, during which it had 
maintained itself against the most powerful monarch in 
Europe, the city surrendered. 

This campaign was especially distinguished from 
others of this reign by its being the only campaign at 
which Philip was personally present. 

Negotiations for peace were soon opened. Cardinal 
Granvelle (son of Charles V.'s celebrated chancellor), 
William of Orange, and the Duke of Alva, — all per- 
sonages of supreme importance in the after history of 
the Netherlands, — were the agents selected by Philip 
to represent his interests, while Montmorency, Marshal 
St. Andre, and the Cardinal of Lorraine, represented 
the French. 

The treaty of Cateau-Cambresis was arranged in 
1559, England, France, and Spain, being the contract- 
ing parties. The difficulty of bringing the English to 
relinquish Calais — "When I die," said Mary, "Calais 
will be found written on my heart,'' — had protracted 
the negotiations to the April of this year ; but the 
whole resulted greatly to the glory of Spain and the 
discredit of France. Philip received two hundred 
towns in Italy and the Netherlands for the five he held 
in Picardy. Rome humbled, France virtually van- 
quished, Naples and Picardy illustrated by honorable 
successes, Philip may well be said to have wiped out, in 
the beginning of his reign, the legacy of failures be- 
queathed him at the close of his father's. The union 
between the enemies was further cemented by a mar- 
riage. 

Mary's brief and painful reign had ended with her 
death in 1558. 



An Ominous Marriage. 461 

Hardly a month after her decease Philip had the au- 
dacity to propose, though without success, to her sister 
Elizabeth, who had now ascended the throne. An offer 
so purely political could not keenly concern Philip's 
heart ; he solaced himself for this and for the loss of 
England with contracting in 1559 a third alliance, this 
time with Isabella of France, daughter of Henry II., 
intended at one time as the future bride of the young 
Don Carlos. 

An ominous marriage, mournfully .celebrated by the 
death of Henry in a tournament with the Scotch Count 
of Montgomery, during the nuptial festivities, and the 
cloud that hangs over Don Carlos. The Huguenots 
may have rejoiced in the death of Henry, the would-be 
exterminator of the Protestant heresy in France • but 
in the clutch of Catharine de Medici and her descend- 
ants, who succeeded him, they soon had occasion to 
repent of their ill-considered joy. 

As Philip's difficulties with the Netherlands — that 
transcendent episode of his reign -*- soon begin, it will 
be well to cast a glance over the condition of things in 
that country at this time. ' 

The provinces, countries, duchies, and lordships con- 
stituting the seventeen states of the Netherlands, were 
anciently distinct and independent states, each gov- 
erned by its own petty sovereign. Infinite toil and per- 
tinacity, intrepid voyages, extensive commerce, the con- 
cession of important political privileges on the part of 
their princes, the rapid growth of communities, and the 
remarkably free institutions of the Netherlanders soon 
conspired to produce a degree of wealth and civiliza- 
tion there that rivalled that of the Adriatic and Medi- 



462 Spain under Philip II. 

terranean states. Sturdily independent, and sharply 
individualized, however ; speaking different languages 
and belonging to different races ; full of feuds and ani- 
mosities towards one another, and repugnant to a consol- 
idation into one monarchy ; they preferred their sepa- 
rate existence, cultivated the arts of peace, prospered 
commercially, and formed a sort of republic tributary to 
the House of Austria. 

There was a supreme court of appeals at Mechlin 
and a general legislative assembly (states-general) com- 
posed of deputies from the provinces, the clergy, and 
the nobility ; but the power of the states-general was at 
once loose and circumscribed, and its movements so 
cumbrous that it could do nothing, not even impose 
taxes, without the sanction of each provincial legis- 
lature. 

Charles's Flemish birth made him popular among the 
Netherlanders, and enabled him to gain a personal as- 
cendency over the higher nobles, which ended in a 
subtle and unperceived undermining of their ancient 
prerogatives. He gave them the highest posts in 
Spain, opened to the people an unlimited trading area 
in his immense possessions, sagaciously cherished the 
material interests — manufactures, husbandry, fertiliza- 
tion by canals, agriculture — of his favorite people, and 
administered to the growth of large cities like Ghent 
(seventy thousand inhabitants), Brussels, (seventy-five 
thousand), and Antwerp, (one hundred thousand), — in 
every possible way. 

A busy, laborious, ingenious population thus swarmed 
through the Netherlands ; their fleets navigated every 
sea; their great fairs gave a vivid pictorial meeting- 




ALCAZAR OF TOLEDO. 



The Netherlands. 465 

point for intercourse between the varied nationalities ; 
liberal municipal rights attracted foreigners ; capitalists 
from every clime filled the Dutch banking-houses ; 
noble exchanges and cathedrals were erected ; illiteracy 
was rare, and a school of painting, characterized by 
exquisite humor, genius for landscape and portrait- 
painting, and a matchless reproduction of homely bur- 
gher life, grew up in the opulent cities, hand in hand 
with the luxurious habits, dress, and style of living of 
the higher population. 

The introduction of Protestantism soon resulted from 
the intercourse between Germany and the Netherlands. 
The reformation spread among the Flemish provinces, 
nobility, and people. Catholicism, with its kindled 
imagination, poetic sensibilities, and pageant-like acces- 
sories, lost its sway over these simple, practical, reason- 
loving people ; and freedom of speculative inquiry — 
an innovation dreaded by Charles — established itself 
among all classes. From 1520 to 1550 the emperor 
fulminated edict after edict against the heretical Neth- 
erlanders, menacing them with " fire, pit, and sword " if 
they did not return to their ancient church. Indigna- 
tion, terror, flight, were the effects of these edicts — a 
system based on the tribunal of the inquisition and 
having as its enginery, imprisonment, torture, confisca- 
tion, banishment, death. 

A slight security was in 1546 afforded the people of 
the Netherlands, by their own regular courts of justice, 
since no sentence whatever could be pronounced by an 
inquisitor without the sanction of some member of the 
provincial council. The free and independent charac- 
ter of the population, however, prevented the complete 



166 Spain under Philip II. 

establishment of the Holy Office in all its rigor. They 
execrated the iniquities of the institution as personified 
in the tragical Spanish auto de ft (act of faith), and 
would not, as they hinted, let the Day of Judgment be 
forestalled on earth and supplanted by the utterances 
of a grand inquisitor. Still there were victims enough ; 
and the. crackle of its fires, the thunder of its edicts, 
and the cries of its victims, tell us that for thirty years 
the workings of the Inquisition were not altogether 
unsatisfactory here. Charles, however, had too much 
need of money to make his religious sensibilities con- 
spicuous ; the Netherlands were his purse ; and he had 
to confess at last, with bitterness, that circumstances 
had compelled him to permit the growth of heresy there. 

In 1559, Philip returned to Spain, never again to 
visit the Low Countries. He had left behind, Egmont, 
as governor of Flanders and Artois, and the Prince of 
Orange as governor of Holland, Zealand, Utrecht, and 
West Friesland ; while two battalions of Spanish sol- 
diers, now thoroughly detested by the people, were left 
with them. Granvelle,, a suave, polished, but ambitious 
ecclesiastic, recommended by Charles to Philip , Count 
Barlaimont, and the erudite jurist Viglius, composed 
the advisory body to be consulted by the lady-regent, 
Margaret of Parma, natural daughter of Charles V. 

Philip repelled the Netherlanders by his icy reserve, 
his lack of enthusiasm, his religious melancholy, and his 
ungenial austerity. They contrasted his partiality for 
the Spaniards, the etiquette and ceremonial he kept up, 
and the gloom of his surroundings with Charles's love 
of their people, his easy manners, and approachability. 
Philip's growing unpopularity took an almost tragical 



Martyr-Fires of Protestantism. 467 

turn, moreover when he attempted to enforce certain 
religious edicts, which created fourteen new bishop- 
rics and three archbishoprics as a salutary exchange 
for the three existing enormous bishoprics of Arras, 
Tournay, and Utrecht. 

Margaret^ duchess of Parma, received her appoint- 
ment in 1559, to rule in Philip's absence ; and as she 
was of Flemish birth her appointment seemed auspi- 
cious. But she fully endorsed her half brother's famous 
saying, " Better not reign at all than reign over here- 
tics," — a principle that enslaved him to an inexorable 
superstition. 

The next six years are of great significance in the 
history of Spain and the Netherlands. The reformed 
doctrines, crushed out of Spain by the Inquisition and 
the auto de fe, as the Jewish and Mahometan heresies 
had been, now developed in the Netherlands into a sort 
of sacred patriotism and passionate representative to 
them of whatever was most precious in matters of civil 
and religious liberty. Spain might be lurid with the 
martyr-fires of Protestantism ; Granada, Barcelona, 
Toledo, and Seville might be wrapped in the smoke of 
the torment of Lutherans ; church holidays, Sundays, 
and public squares might be made cheerful with the 
agonies of multitudes dragged from the dungeons of the 
Inquisition ; and one by one the gentle lights of Chris- 
tianity be extinguished by the fingers of the priests : in 
the Netherlands the love of toleration had rooted itself, 
and no power on earth — not even Philip's, not even 
the cardinal-archbishop of Seville's, grand Inquisitor 
and what not — could trample it out. 



468 Spain under Philip II 

So, while nobles and gentlewomen, bishops and dig- 
nitaries, writhed at the stake, did humiliating penance, 
or were "reconciled," and the fires, for lack of material, 
gradually slackened, till by 1570 they gleaned only a 
solitary Lutheran here and there for the delectation of 
the spectacle-loving grandees ; while speculative, physi- 
cal, and practical science, literature, and culture, were 
mute, or merged in a theology with which innovation 
was a crime ; the very principle thus destructive to Spain 
struck ineradicable roots in Holland, and gave birth 
not only to liberty, but to an intense intellectual activity 
in due proportion to the efforts made to extinguish k. 

Denmark, Sweden, England, and France were deeply 
agitated by the same questions falling from the lips of 
Knox, Calvin, and their compeers. Even a king of 
Navarre had declared himself a Protestant. And per- 
haps it would have fared ill with Catholicism, had not 
Philip, tolerant of no other religion, " offered a coun- 
terpoise to the Protestant cause, which prevented it 
from making itself master of Europe." Unphilosoph- 
ical, bigoted, making the maintenance of Catholicism 
a point of honor, he erred capitally in giving so much 
authority to foreigners in the Netherlands — particularly 
to the unscrupulous Granvelle — and excluding the 
princes to whom he owed St. Quentin and Gravelines. 
He did not take proper measures to employ or satisfy 
the hordes of inferior aristocracy and disbanded sol- 
diery vagabondizing through the land and producing 
crying discontent. He did not fulfil his promise of 
removing the hated Spanish troops until 1561, more 
than a year after he had stipulated to do so. 



Orange and Egmont. 469 

While the great nobles affected devotion to the estab- 
lished religion, some of them were far from feeling it. 
Troubles arose in which the Lady Margaret accused 
Orange and Egmont of fomenting discord between the 
people and the crown. Granvelle's usurpation, zeal, 
and arrogance provoked open war with the nobles, who 
refused to have anything to do with him. Philip, pas- 
sionately urged by the regent to come personally to the 
Netherlands to arrange matters, to suggest a way out of 
difficulties, delayed and delayed, doing so with an indif- 
ference that soon became characteristic of all his move- 
ments. A league was formed against Granvelle. Even 
Margaret, who had formerly enthusiastically upheld her 
minister, gave way before the storm of opposition, and 
prayed for his dismissal. Philip deliberated, dilly- 
dallied, temporized. Finally, in 1564, he discharged 
Granvelle — intelligence of which was received with 
frantic joy ; and the minister soon quitted Brussels 
never to return. 

Philip in his policy with the Netherlands, haunted by 
superstitious shadows, fancied himself continually 
treacling in the footsteps of his father. But the people 
had changed. Calvinists, Lutherans, Jews, swarmed 
among them. He himself was heartily disliked as a 
Spaniard. He had made deplorable missteps ; he had 
retraced them ; but with an obstinacy inflexible as steel 
he now joined issue with the people themselves in a 
struggle of life and death. 

Philip declared he would rather lose a hundred thou- 
sand lives, if he had so many, than allow a single 
change in matters of religion. 



470 Spain under Philip II 

At length, dragged out of his mask of deceit, delay, 
and perfidy, and losing his temper over the persistent cry 
from the Netherlands for reform, he flashed out of his 
silence in the letter from the Wood of Segovia, in Octo- 
ber 1565, and at once destroyed all hopes of religious 
toleration, virtually established the inquisition in the 
Flemish towns, and called forth the " Compromise." 




) i 



CATTLE MERCHANT Of CORDOVA. 



CHAPTER XX. 
THE STRUGGLE IN THE NETHERLANDS. 

THE "Compromise" was a document proceeding 
from a body of twenty young cavaliers, who met 
in Count Culemborg's palace at .Brussels, for the pur- 
pose of talking over the evils of the country. In this 
document they bound themselves by a solemn oath to 
resist the Inquisition ; and protect one another in it with 
their lives and fortunes. 

Copies of the " Compromise " were soon circulated, 
and enormous numbers, Catholics and Protestants 
equally, signed their names to it at once. Orange's 
young brother, Louis, Count of Nassau, Philip de 
Marnix, Henry of Brederode, and other prominent 
nobles were ring-leaders in the league. The greatest 
of the great lords, however, as yet held aloof. A panic 
spread through the land and thousands sought refuge 
in England from the impending calamities. William of 
Orange, habitually cautious, temperate, and quiet, 
acted with extreme prudence, and had not yet identified 
himself with the movement ; while Egmont, impulsive, 
knightly-tempered, a devout Catholic and eloquently 
loyal at this great crisis, could not desert the distressed 

473 



474 Spain under Philip II 

and perplexed regent but continued to stand by her at 
this critical moment like the noble knight and gentle- 
man that he was. 

But as the contest proceeded, the figure of William of 
Orange, came out clearer and clearer. At first shadowy, 
undecided, reserved, we see him supporting the bent 
form of Charles V., on the striking occasion of his ab- 
dication. Lord of Breda, Chalons, and Orange (a 
principality in the heart of France), he had been bred a 
Catholic in the family of the emperor's sister, the Queen 
of Hungary, formerly regent. Early manifesting extra- 
ordinary qualities, which he showed on the battle-field 
and in diplomatic missions, he was selected by Charles 
for the honorable office of bearing the imperial crown 
to Ferdinand. One of the hostages detained in France 
for the proper execution of the treaty of Cateau Cam- 
bresis, he became acquainted, at the Court of Henry II., 
with his and Philip's designs against Protestantism, con- 
ceived a deep disgust for the Spaniards, and resolved 
to expel them from the Netherlands. Despite the em- 
peror's recommendation he could not win the regard or 
confidence of the suspicious Philip. Convivial, fond of 
hunting and hawking, an adept in gallantry, famous for 
his gastronomic tastes, entertaining magnificently, ca- 
pable of being wrought up out of his reserve into rare 
eloquence, he appeared to be indifferent to religion or 
to regard it as a politic invention ; loved and exercised 
a benignant tolerance in affairs of conscience, and 
showed his German parentage by upholding freedom of 
speculation as a right inalienable of the human race. 
Born two hundred years before Washington, William 
the Silent has often been compared with the great re- 



"Vivent les G-ueuz" 475 

publican; and if self-abnegation, magnanimity, and suf- 
fering for the loftiest of earthly causes can cast a trans- 
figuration over human character, his deserves the 
double glory of exalted patriotism and martyrbom. 

In 1566, two hundred of the confederates entered 
Brussels, and, headed by Viscount Brederode and Louis 
of Nassau, presented a petition to Margaret, praying 
the instant abolition of the inquisition and the edicts. 
Margaret regarding with alarm the numbers and mar- 
tial array of the confederates, as they presented them- 
selves before her at the palace, was quieted by Count 
Barlaimont who told her " they were nothing but a 
crowd of beggars." From this arose the celebrated 
watch-word of " Vivent les Gueux " (beggars) which, 
soon further heightened by a beggar's wallet and a 
wooden bowl, became the symbol of the uprisen, Protes- 
tant Netherlands. 

Brought to bay by the insurrectionary movements in 
the north, and by the representations of Baron de 
Montigny, who had now been sent by the regent to urge 
his acquiescence in the reforms demanded by the league, 
Philip appeared to relent and to make concessions, 
made pretence of abolishing the inquisition in favor of 
the inquisitorial powers vested in the bishops, and de- 
clared a pretended general pardon to whomsoever the 
regent wished, the already condemned excepted. But 
the whole was a tissue of perfidy on his part, for he men- 
tally reserved to himself the right to revoke whatever 
terms had been made with the reformers, and his maxim 
with regard to them was, " No faith to be kept with 
heretics." 

Don Carlos, contemptuously referring to his father's 



476 Spain under Philip II 

repeated but unfulfilled promises to visit the Nether- 
lands in person, scribbled on his blank-book one day, 
" The Great and Admirable Voyages of King Philip," 
and within as contents, " From Madrid to the Par- 
do, from the Pardo to the Escorial, from the Escorial to 
Aranjuez," etc. 

The same year the beautiful cathedral of Antwerp was 
sacrilegiously devastated by a mob, who, dragging the 
the statue of Christ to the ground with a rope about its 
neck, left the two thieves ; ' as if to preside over the 
work of rapine below." Iconoclastic fury seized the 
rabble in various provinces : four hundred churches in 
Flanders alone furnished fuel to this band of saint- 
haters and image-breakers, and that in less than a fort- 
night. Alarm pervaded Brussels : Margaret determined 
on flight, but was induced to relinquish her scheme of 
departure. Churches were conceded for the reformed 
worship, and for the moment tranquillity seemed re-estab- 
lished. Philip, on learning of the disorders, burst into 
frantic passion, and swore by the soul of his father that 
they should cost the perpetrators dear. His bitter sus- 
picions instantly fixed upon the great nobles as at the 
bottom of the troubles in Flanders, particularly upon 
Orange, Egmont, and Van Hoorne. Love and patriot- 
ism — his wife and the sufferings of his fatherland — 
had now made William of Orange a Calvinist, and 
roused from indifference, he stood forth as the cham- 
pion of the Reformation, ready to risk all in the strug- 
gle. 

The famous test-oath of loyalty brought forward by 
Margaret to try the obedience of the knights of the Gol- 
den Fleece, the great nobles, and the high civil and 



'H\': """**■*"- 




The Duke of Alva. 479 

military officers, to the crown, drove Orange from the 
Netherlands to Germany, while Counts Hoorne, Hoogs- 
traten, and Brederode, also refused to swear to it, and 
retired to their estates. Egmont subscribed. A tide of 
emigration again set in which threatened to empty the 
country into the lap of England, France, and Germany. 

Urged by the anguish of Pius V., at the dissemination 
of heresy in the Low Country, Philip the Slow at length 
sent the Duke of Alva in 1567 to Brussels. With ten 
thousand picked men he made his admirable march 
from Genoa, through countries of every sjjade of un- 
friendliness, to the Netherlands without accident, op- 
position, or trespass of any kind. He arrived in 
Brussels August 22, 1567. His powers were practically 
unlimited, while to Margaret, as a recompense for all 
her faithfulness, anxiety, and labor, was still left for a 
short time the meaningless title of "regent." He had 
supreme control in civil and military affairs and was a 
king in all but the name. He was to levy war on the 
rebellious people, and inquire into and punish the origi- 
nators of the recent troubles. He garrisoned the great 
towns, erected fortresses, let loose his licentious sol- 
diery on the unprotected population, and under pretence 
of holding a council of state, summoned Egmont and 
Hoorne to Culemborg House in Brussels, where they 
were arrested and confined. 

" This sword has done the king service more than 
once," said Egmont, delivering up the weapon rendered 
immortal by the blood-stains of St. Quentin and Grave- 
lines. 

Granvelle, learning that the duke " had not drawn 
into his net the Silent One," (William the Silent), said, 
" If he has not caught him, he has caught nothing." 



480 Spain under Philip II. 

The establishment of the Council of Blood was but 
a natural sequence of these enormities. Its twelve 
judges — mostly men of ancient and honorable family, 
with the exception of the infamous Del Rio and the 
criminal Juan de Vargas — had cognizance of all civil 
and criminal cases that had grown out of the late dis- 
orders, and superseded the great court of Mechlin and 
every other provincial or municipal tribunal in the coun- 
try. Its establishment was a burning outrage on the 
constitutional rights of the nation. 

In February, 1568, a royal edict literally swept the 
whole nation with the penalties of treason, death, and 
confiscation. Innumerable arrests, trials, and execu- 
tions followed, without distinction of sex, age, or char- 
acter, but met with a heroism as pathetic as it was in- 
domitable. 

Worn out with signing death-warrants, it is said that 
Vargas would fall asleep in his chair, and, being sud- 
denly roused, would exclaim, half-awake, " To the gal- 
lows ! to the gallows ! " 

Confiscation and perpetual banishment were promul- 
gated against the Orange princes. Though powerful 
efforts were made to save the unfortunate Egmont and 
Hoorne, they were in vain. They were charged with 
sedition, encouragement of sectaries, and treason, ex- 
amined, and sentenced to death. 

This blood bore rich fruit to the cause of reform. 

It is now time to glance at events in the South. 

The defence of Malta in 1565 under La Valette 
against Solyman II., is a bright spot in the annals of 
this reign — a siege which gave a tremendous shock to 



Events in the South. 481 

the Moslem power in the Mediterranean, cost Solyman 
more than thirty thousands men, and brought the 
Knights Hospitallers of St. John, who conducted the 
defence, to the highest point of glory. Charles V., 
after their expulsion from Rhodes by the Turks, had 
ceded Malta to this noble military order on payment of 
a falcon annually, in token of his feudal supremacy ; 
they had become immensely wealthy, had elaborated a 
far-reaching scheme for the government of the order, 
had developed a navy which swept the Turkish seas ; 
eventually they had roused the vengeance of Solyman. 
After a fierce siege the Turks were overpowered ; Dro- 
gut, one of their commanders, was killed ; and the 
white flag of St. John floated once more triumphantly 
over the crags and promontories of Malta, — " City of 
Refuge." 

Its capital, Valetta, commemorates the reverence and 
admiration in which their great commander was held 
by the knights, and its cathedral holds his ashes. 
Malta lies like a jewel cast upon these sparkling Medi- 
terranean seas; and the desire of the eyes no less than 
vengeance may have made the Turks flock in tens of 
thousands about its cliffs in this memorable undertak- 
ing. What a picture ! the sheer morning seas infinitely 
blue and still ; the rock itself bristling with unfinished 
fortification, ravelin and counterscarp ; the sturdy little 
community of knights, battling for God and soul's sal- 
vation ; Mustapha with his myriads howling about the 
impregnable haven, and the sea white with the innumer- 
able moons of Islam. Then flash of cannonade, thun- 
der of artillery, tumultuous onslaught, and the mighty 
tragedy has begun. 



482 Spain under Philip 11. 

The Netherlands and Malta were not the only spots 
illumined by dismal or heroic tragedy at this time. In 
Spain, in Philip's own family, within the sumptuous 
boudoirs of the palace itself, almost in the very bed- 
chamber of the king, had been slowly gathering the 
clouds of a mysterious crime as yet unfathomed by his- 
torian or chronicler. This was the conspiracy, confine- 
ment and death of Don Carlos, at this time Philip's 
only sou. 

Don Carlos was now but twenty-three — wayward, 
dissipated, discontented ; and the eccentricity of his 
conduct — carefully educated in all manly and intellect- 
ual exercises as he had been — can only be accounted 
for on the ground of hereditary insanity. A fearless, 
generous, sarcastic disposition, he was fierce, cruel, and 
diseased, both in mind and body. Upon such a char- 
acter the spectacle of his father carrying off the beauti- 
ful Isabella of France, who had been intended for him, 
is supposed to have produced a profound impression. 
Brought up with his uncle, Don Juan of Austria, and 
his cousin, Alexander Farnese, son of Margaret of 
Parma, both afterward to be so celebrated in their con- 
nection with the Netherlands, he imbibed all the lawless 
habits of the time, carrying pistols, assaulting people 
on the street with swords, insulting women, and acting 
with the utmost violence towards his tutor, his chamber- 
lain, and Cardinal Espinosa, threatening to poniard the 
latter for banishing a player from the palace. Such 
reckless defiance of decency brought upon him the deep 
displeasure of his father. He was distrusted, excluded 
from military and political offices, surrounded by spies, 
and tormented in the petty and ignominious ways which 



"i" will kill Your 485 

Philip knew so well how to practice. Drawing his dag- 
ger on the Duke of Alva previous to his departure for 
Flanders, Carlos, who had regarded himself as the 
proper person to be entrusted with the mission, fiercely 
exclaimed, " You shall not go ; if you do, I will kill 
you." Hemmed in on all sides, the wretched prince of 
the Asturias conceived the idea of flight to a foreign 
land. Before attempting to put his plan into execution, 
and dogged as by some insane hallucination, he kept 
repeating before his gentleman of the bed-chamber that 
"he desired to kill a man with whom he had a quarrel." 
He made the same avowal to his confessor at the 
Christmas anniversary of 1567 ; whereupon he was re- 
fused absolution. Being entreated to tell who the per- 
son was, he said "his father was the person, and he 
wished to have his life." 

Carlos, who habitually slept with a sword, dagger, and 
loaded musket within reach, was surprised in sleep and 
imprisoned in his apartment. He threatened to kill 
himself, declared that he was not mad, and that the 
king's treatment of him was driving him to despair. 
" The king's dagger followed close on his smile," said 
Cabrera. 

A long process was begun ; perpetual imprison- 
ment was determined upon; and though pretending 
anguish at the conduct of his son, Philip subjected 
him to the most rigorous incarceration. To his design 
on his father's life was now added the suspicion that 
Carlos was either a Lutheran or an infidel. Philip 
even neglected the magnificent pile of the Escorial, 
now rising in all its commemorative glory of granite 
on a spur of the Guadarramas, to keep intense watch 



486 Spain under Philip 11. 

over the sullen and frenzied prisoner of the palace. 
Tortured by mental excitement and physical debility, 
Don Carlos indulged in the wildest excesses, alter- 
nately freezing, starving, and then gorging himself; 
vomiting, dysentery set in ; his strength swiftly passed 
away, till on the Vigil of St. James, in 1568, after con- 
fessing, and adoring the crucifix grasped in his poor, 
trembling, diseased hands, he fell back and expired 
without a groan. 

Philip the same night had stolen in on tip-toe, like a 
conscience-stricken spectre, and made over his dying 
son the shadowy benediction of the cross. But Isa- 
bella, whom Carlos loved and revered, had been kept 
away. 

The belief was rife that the prince had been con- 
demned to death by casuists and inquisitors, and that 
his sentence was slow poisoning, lasting four months. 
Philip was proclaimed by William of Orange the mur- 
derer of his son, as he afterwards became of the Prince of 
Orange ; and it was remembered of Philip that he had 
said to a heretic, " Were my son such a wretch as thou 
art, I would myself carry the fagots to burn him." 
Responsibility if not guilt rested upon the unhappy 
father, and we may agree with the historian that if he 
did not directly employ the hand of the assassin to 
take the life of his son, yet by his rigorous treatment he 
drove him to such desperation that it ended in death. 

Thus this poor young life was wasted away by prema- 
ture disease, exasperation, and excess. Its brilliant 
dawn ; its heirship to the noblest throne in Christendom ; 
its boundless gifts of ancestry, inheritance, and fortune, 
were as nothing before its own passions and the rigor 
of an inexorable father. 



A Moorish Invasion. 487 

Isabella of France, after a brief reign of eight years 
as Philip's wife, died at twenty-three, the same year as 
Don Carlos. " She passed away," says old Brantome, 
" in the sweet and pleasant April of her age, when her 
beauty was such that it seemed as if it might almost 
defy the assaults of time." 

And in less than eighteen months the inconsolable 
widower had married his fourth wife — this time Anne 
of Austria. She was the daughter of Maximilian of 
Germany, and his own niece. 

As for the so-called amours of Carlos and Isabella, 
there seems as yet no historical foundation for them. 
They loved each other as step-mother and step-son 
should, and as a step-son, tormented and treated as 
Don Carlos was, would naturally love a beautiful, 
kindly-tempered woman, who had interested herself in 
his fate. There is no trace of criminal passion to fleck 
this story of a noble and pathetic relationship. 

Between 1566 and 1572 Spain was again agitated by 
a Moorish rebellion. Under Charles, the Moors, though 
subject to the constant terror of the Inquisition, lived 
in comparative ease and quietude, contributing and con- 
forming, outwardly at least, to the established faith. 
They rapidly multiplied ; their hamlets and farms cov- 
ered the Sierras ; among the mountains they preserved 
their wild and independent spirit, and in the plains and 
vegas, their ingenuity and patient toil had converted 
the country into a paradise. Granada had been special- 
ly favored in the treaty with the Moors, and its lovely 
environs showed an almost boundless fertility under the 
culture of the inhabitants. 

But Philip fretted that these infidels did not renounce 



488 Spain under Philip 71. 

their immemorial religion and usages wholesale, abjure 
their ancient memories, and come at once within the pale 
of the Catholic church. The unfortunate Moriscoes, 
however, escaped legislation for some years after Philip's 
accession, and it was not till 1560 and 1563 that laws 
were published interdicting them the use of African 
slaves and prohibiting them from possessing unlicensed 
arms ; both of which were impolitic edicts and exasper- 
ated this already long-suffering people. Soon Guerrero, 
archbishop of Granada, drew the attention of the govern- 
ment to the manifold backslidings of the New Chris- 
tians, — as the converted Moors were called, — their 
washing off the traces of baptism from their newly- 
sprinkled children, their practice of circumcision, their 
solemnization of marriage with their own national sports 
and dances, and their alleged kidnapping and circum- 
cising of Christian children. Hence a law unparalleled 
for cruelty was drawn up, and signed by Philip in 1566, 
outraging the most sacred feelings of the Moors, tearing 
asunder the strongest ties of kindred and country, vio- 
lating private life in the profanest manner, and evoking 
agonies of grief from the outraged nationality. 

This law interdicted them the employment of Arabic 
either in speaking or writing, compelled them to change 
Arabic for Spanish family names, declared void all legal 
instruments not written in Castilian, allowed three years 
for the entire nation to learn an absolutely different 
speech, wholly irreconcilable with their own, and re- 
quired the substitution of Spanish costumes for their 
own graceful and flowing Oriental dress. The veils — a 
necessity to the pure Mahometan — were torn from the 
faces of the women. Their weddings were to be 




AN AGED MEXDICANr AND HIS GRANDCHILD. 



Legal Cruelty. 491 

Christianized and solemnized in public. It was penal 
to wear silk. Their national songs and dances were 
made crimes. And it became a heinous offence to in- 
dulge in warm baths. The most frightful penalties — 
confiscation, the galleys, hundreds of lashes, — enforced 
this edict. 

The publication of the act in the great square of 
Granada, in 1567, — still to-day carpeted with poetic 
memories of the Arabians, and penetrated by long lines 
of noble limes, — called forth such shame, sorrow, and 
hatred, as have rung on piteously even down into our 
time. Remonstrances, supplications, menaces, were in 
vain. Philip was like a rock, and quailed not at the 
spectacle of an agonized people lying heart-broken at 
his feet. The edict was mercilessly proclaimed in every 
part of the kingdom of Granada. 

At once the Moors sprang to arms, under Aben Hu- 
meya, a descendant of the Omaiyades. 

But for a moment our attention is arrested at this 
point by a knightly and courteous figure, withdrawing 
us from the enormities of the war, and concentrating 
our gaze upon its own fresh youth, gayety, and brilliancy. 

Don Juan of Austria (born about 1545), — Philip's 
bastard brother, said to be the son of Charles V. and 
a beautiful young German girl of Ratisbon, — came to 
take charge of the war. A perfect chevalier in all 
noble exercises, of singular beauty and nobility of 
countenance, generous, fiery, and full of heroic aspira- 
tion, Don Juan rose as by enchantment from an ob- 
scure and ambiguous position as Luis Quixada's ward 
to that of an illustrious prince, acknowledged in 1559 
by Philip as his brother. He comes before us, out of 



492 Spain under Philip II. 

the mists of this dark reign, like a dazzling personifica- 
tion of the last dying spirit of chivalry, — an echo from 
the romantic land of the Gerusalemme Liberata, — a prince 
and paladin of legendary story, full of tenderness for his" 
adopted mother Dona Magdalena Quixada, romantically 
popular among the people who idolized him, discreet 
yet impetuous, revealing in his sunny hair, frank blue 
eyes, and fair complexion, traces of his German blood, 
and altogether the most gorgeous and winning person- 
ality on the stage of Spanish affairs since the times of 
the great Gonsalvo. 

In 1569, he entered the gates of Granada, surrounded 
by a throng of supplicating humanity — black-stoled 
Moorish women, with tears streaming from their eyes, who 
besought protection for their wretched relatives. The 
splendid pageant passed on like a gleam of sunlight 
amid this dark-shrouded multitude, and help for a mo- 
ment seemed to lie in the grace and sympathy of the 
brilliant commander-in-chief. 

But these hopes were of brief duration. A stern de- 
cree came removing the Moriscoes from their beloved 
Granada, city of delights, of palaces, of fountains, and 
myrtle-gardens. Consternation, grief, expulsion, eter- 
nal farewell to their ancient city so tenderly intertwined 
with sweet and holy recollections, distribution of their 
children throughout Spain, ruin to Granada, — a single 
swift decree, like a flash from Dante's Hell, condensed 
and concentrated the miseries of this dismal picture. 

In brief space the rebellion was crushed, Aben-Aboo, 
" the little king of the Alpujarras," who had succeeded 
Aben Humeya, was treacherously murdered in 157 1 by 
one of his officers. His body was brought to Granada 



A Savage Edict. 493 

and his head put in a cage ; and the war sank in a mist 
of blood, execution, and exile. Don Juan had by his 
own request been relieved of the command in 1570. 

The fitting close to this episode was one of those sav- 
age edicts which were the only mode of literary com- 
position in which Philip excelled. The Moriscoes were 
all expelled from the kingdom of Granada ; the country 
was districted and placed under scrupulous military 
superintendence, and the people were thrust into chilling 
exile among the distant provinces of the peninsula. 

As they had lisped in Arabic, so now they learned to 
sing in Spanish. As they had danced the voluptuous 
Andalusian dances, so now their feet learned the intri- 
cate measures of the fandango and the bolero. Lan- 
guageless, countryless, barbarously bereft of national 
existence, denuded even of their immemorial costume, 
they clothed their nakedness in Spanish jackets, learned 
the suave melodies of the Castilian, and, impelled by 
necessity to profound dissimulation, slipped readily into 
the embrace of another faith and another fatherland. 
But a hate blacker than night and deeper than hell 
slumbered beneath the ripple of their exiled laughter ; 
and though they might dance, and sing, and jest in 
Spanish, in their heart of hearts they were more fiercely 
Arabic than ever. 



CHAPTER XXI. 
PHILIP'S CHARACTER AND POLICY. 

IT was a national characteristic of the Spaniard to 
be perpetually engaged in a crusade. All his wars 
were religious wars, whether he scoured the infidel 
Levant, campaigned against the Moors, or grappled 
with the heretic Netherlanders. William of Orange 
and Selim II., were equally enemies of the faith, and 
both were treated by the bigot of the Escorial with 
equally intense hatred. Philip had more tolerance for 
outright infidelity than for lapsed Catholicism. It was 
his fate, or rather his glory to be perpetually harassed 
by the Turks. Malta had become a spot of renown 
in his struggle with Solyman the Magnificent (1566); 
and now the Adriatic, sprinkled with innumerable is- 
lands as with fragments of a disrupted continent, was 
to shed even greater lustre on Spanish annals. 

Selim II., resolving on the acquisition of Cyprus, at- 
tempted to snatch this precious gem from the crown of 
Venice. Venice appealed to Pius V., who in his turn 
pleaded the cause of the forlorn republic in an ear that 
never turned away from such an appeal. Philip, the 
great champion of the faith, listened with benignity to 
the proposition of the league to be formed against the 

494 



The Holy League. 497 

Eastern despot, and being in especially good humor, it 
would seem, by his recent marriage with Anne of Aus- 
tria, dismissed the papal legate with assurances of im- 
mediate succor to Venice. 

The Holy League was ratified in 157 1 between the 
pope and the ambassadors of Spain and Venice. Fifty 
thousand foot, four thousand five hundred horse, two 
hundred galleys, and one hundred transports, with ar- 
tillery and munitions, were the forces pledged by the 
allied powers. 

Naples, Sicily, the Balearic Isles, and the seaports of 
the Peninsula, soon rang with the hammers of the swarm- 
ing artisans making preparations for the splendid naval 
armament. The Castilian sensibilities kindled into a 
fire, and lords and cavaliers thronged about the chival- 
rous presence of Don Juan, the captain-general. With 
a magnificent retinue he passed over to Italy and 
dropped anchor in the bay of Naples. To the Italians 
he seemed like a young demi-god of twenty-four, with 
his snow-white plumes, golden curls, dress of white vel- 
vet and cloth of gold, and dauntless bearing • and his 
dancing, fencing, tennis-playing, his open physiognomy 
and courteous manners, intoxicated the volatile Neapoli- 
tans, and made them dream of some antique mirror of 
chivalry. He was presented with the consecrated stan- 
dard, sailed over the glancing Sicilian waters to Messina, 
and was welcomed with cannon-thunder, fire-works, and 
multitudinous acclaim. The allied fleet was a floating 
city of eighty thousand men, twenty-nine thousand of 
whom were soldiers, nineteen thousand being the Span- 
ish quota. They all to a man fasted three days, con- 
fessed, communed, were absolved from their sins, and 



498 Spam under Philip 11. 

indulged by the pope as if they were crusading for the 
deliverance of Jerusalem ; and thus equipped, they set 
forth from Messina, coasted Calabria, and steered for 
Corfu, where they learned that the Ottoman fleet, after 
ravaging the Venetian territories, lay with a powerful 
armament in the Gulf of Lepanto. 

There were many memorable persons present in this 
famous battle — Don Juan, Veniero (the Venetian cap- 
tain-general), Colonna (the papal captain-general)^ the 
Grand Commander Requesens, and Alexander Farnese, 




Cervantes. 

both of whom attained such sad celebrity in the Neth- 
erland wars ; Cardona, general of the Sicilian fleet, 
Andria Doria, and last but not least, Cervantes, the im- 
mortal author of Don Quixote, serving as a common 
soldier. 

It was resolved to give immediate battle. 

Certainly no more striking and beautiful spot, no 
spot more sprinkled with undying souvenirs, no spot 



A Striking Spot. 499 

more dazzlingly becircled with blue seas, amethystine 
peaks, and islets magically scattered on pellucid water, 
could have been chosen for the greatest naval battle of 
modern times. It was ground, all of which had been 
immortalized by ancient poet, philosopher, or politician. 
Actium was near ; Ithaca was near; Corfu, where the 
first naval battle recorded in history took place, was 
Don Juan's first stopping-place ; Leucadia, the Isle of 
Sappho ; Paxo, famous for the legend of Pan which 
Milton and Mrs. Browning have embalmed ; the ancient 
Scheria of Homer, where Odysseus was cast away and 
rescued by Nausikaa ; fields which had felt the foot- 
steps of Tibullus ; temples of Jupiter before which 
Nero had danced; convents where crusaders stopped 
on their pilgrimages to the Holy Land; estates once 
owned by Cicero, and spots where Cicero himself had 
meditated ; the gardens of Alkinous ; cliffs rising thou- 
sands of feet in the crystalline atmosphere ; crags con- 
secrated by the musings of Nicostratos, Deucalion, Ar- 
temisia ; islands memorable for the marriage of Antony 
and Octavia, for the landing of St. Helena going to 
Palestine to look for the true cross, for the temporary 
abode of Augustus, of Diocletian, of Cato, and the 
blind Belisarius ; islands all tasselled with early Athen- 
ian and Peloponnesian memories ; Olympian Elis down 
the coast, and pregnant and eloquent suggestiveness in 
everything on which the eye fell ; surely an unrivalled 
spot for so transcendent a passage-at-arms. 

The Sabbath-like stillness of an exquisite October 
morning, — more exquisite, perhaps, in these opalescent 
Ionian seas than any where else in the world — was 
soon rent by the passionate thunders of Ali Pasha's 



500 



Spain under Philip II 



and Don Juan's might)' fleets. In four hours the Mos- 
lems were almost annihilated. Ruin met the blazing 
and sinking galleys of Algiers and Constantinople. 
Forty out of two hundred and fifty galleys escaped, 
while one hundred and thirty were captured. The all- 
engulfing seas swallowed the rest. Ali Pasha was 
slain ; twenty-five thousand Turks were killed ; five 
thousand were taken prisoner ; twelve thousand Chris- 
tian slaves, chained to the oar, liberated ; gold, jewels, 
biocade, ore hundred and seventy thousand gold 




The Battle of Lepanto. 

sequins, and multitudes of valuable articles, formed 
part of the booty. Cervantes lost the use of his left 
hand from a wound received in this battle. The allies 
lost eight thousand men. 

Ottoman decline dates from this defeat. 

In 1574, Don Juan with twenty thousand men, took 
Tunis, together with prodigious booty, which was soon 
retaken by the Moslems. 



Domestic Administration. 501 

Thus passed away the vision of African sovereignty, 
— of a kingdom to the south of the Mediterranean, — 
which had flickered restlessly, "a sightless substance/' 
before the mind of the ambitious young prince. Other 
visions began to flicker ere long before the same rest- 
less imagination — union with Elizabeth, chivalrous 
maintenance of the cause of Mary of Scotland, mar- 
riage with the Scotch queen — all possible and impos- 
sible ambitions haunted the yellow-haired son of impe- 
rial Charles. And while he dreamed of Elizabeth as a 
wife, Philip ended by trying to poison her. 

Meanwhile, the domestic administration of Spain 
under Philip must be briefly sketched, and its salient 
points noted before returning to the Eighty Years' War 
of the Netherlands, — a war which did not absolutely 
become a struggle for national independence until it 
had continued for twenty-five years, and which did not 
end till the peace of Westphalia in 1648. For it must 
be remembered that the Netherlander were resisting 
unjust taxation, usurpations of the rights of their own 
constitutional assemblies, and, above all, the establish- 
ment of the Inquisition ; nor had they an idea at first 
of severing their connection with the Spanish crown. 

. But the edict of 1568, dooming to death three millions 
of people, followed by the butchery of eighteen thou- 
sand during Alva's administration alone, was gradually 
bringing these rugged, hirsute, tolerance-loving Dutch- 
men to the belief that they could not possibly live with 
Philip on any terms — a belief which ripened into vir- 
tual independence in 1581 and was forever signed and 
sealed by the martyr-blood of William of Orange, in 
1584. 



502 Spain under Philip II 

The despotism built upon the ruins of constitutional 
liberty by the Emperor Charles, and transmitted by 
him to Philip, found an able perpetuator in that mon- 
arch. Philip's Spanish birth enabled him to get a more 
subtle control over his people than his father had had, 
to aggrandize himself at the expense of his subjects, to 
gain such ascendency that everything he said and did 
was regarded with reverence. He dreaded the calling 
in of cortes for any important step ; hence he extended 
the three councils of state, left him by Ferdinand and 
Isabella and by Charles, to sixteen, composed mainly of 
eminent ecclesiastics and jurists, a plan which enabled 
him, in large measure, to dispense with the constitu- 
tional legislative body. 

Indefatigable scribe that he was, Philip delighted in 
long-written reports sent in by these councils, to which 
he added endless commentaries in his own hand-writing. 
Mountains of autograph — the production of himself 
and his unhappy secretaries — remain to attest his mar- 
vellous industry. Despatch-writing was his bread of 
life, varied occasionally by gunning or cross-bow shoot- 
ing in his palace-grounds. Travel he detested, and 
there were many parts of his own peninsular dominions 
which his gout, his emaciated frame, or his constitu- 
tional sluggishness never permitted him to visit. He 
became almost as difficult of access as a Japanese 
Mikado, wrapped up in the recesses of his huge palace- 
monastery of the Escorial, moving about in close car- 
riages, after dark, or in the woods. His acquired 
knowledge of Spain — by actual observation he knew 
little — was immense and exact, and was gathered from 
maps, surveys, and statistics compiled for him ; while 



Philip's Private Life. 503 

countless spies, flitting about continental and insular 
courts, kept him curiously informed of everything that 
was going on in distant countries. He seems to have 
lived in almost absolute isolation, and to have trusted 
nobody, for he kept spies on his spies, and writhed in 
everlasting and uneasy suspicion of his most confidential 
advisors. No martyr could excel him in a sort of patience 
which approached as nearly to a virtue as any quality 
he possessed. The splendor of his early munificence 
soon narrowed into a pinching economy, called for by 
his many schemes, for which sixteen millions of annual 
revenue were insufficient. The man himself always 
comes before us clad in black velvet or satin, — black 
velvet shoes, plumed Spanish cap, — lighted up now and 
then about the neck with the gorgeous circlet of the 
Golden Fleece. 

The most mischievous of his qualities as an adminis- 
trator was his procrastination, — a vice which heaped 
up business and involved him in those myriads of de- 
tails, every one of which he desired to arrange himself ; 
thus accomplishing but little in months. 

The wealthy aristocracy — the wealthiest in Europe, 
perhaps — imitated Philip's lavish expenditure in the 
beginning, and revelled in equipages, liveries, retainers, 
banquetings, dice-playing, and frivolous amusements. 
Their ancestral castles were filled with serving hidalgos 
and cavaliers, body-guards, elegant plate, sumptuous 
chattels, kneeling vassals, and regal pomp. And though 
they might be viceroys of Naples, Sicily, or Milan, and 
captains-general of the Netherlands, Philip studiously 
kept them apart at home and turned them into a body 



504 Spain under Philip II 

of country gentlemen, without political power, living idly 
on their estates. 

The Castilian commons had been equally plucked 
of their feathers, and they cringed in the dust, an abject 
spectre of what they had been in the proud days of the 
Catholic sovereigns. They might remonstrate against 
the enormous expenses of the king's household, against 
the Burgundian ceremonial, against the alienation of 
crown lands, against taxes unsanctioned by the ancient 
laws of the cortes, against the king's neglect of the 
codification of the Castilian laws, against the tyranny 
of the crown in seizing for its own use all the bullion 
privately imported by the Seville merchants from the 
New World. Philip replied serenely and with a sweet- 
ness of temper that left nothing to be desired. 

The love of costly and ostentatious dress was sought 
to be checked by sumptuary laws. The cortes tried to 
keep all the gold and silver in the country by repressive 
measures ; for lack of graver things, meddled with 
table expenses, courses of viands, the scandalous in- 
crease of coaches ; and stimulated bull-baiting by 
advising the erection of new amphitheatres, breeding 
better horses, and the like. Minute impertinences like 
these — brought forward by a body but a shadow of 
its former venerable self, and • destitute of all real 
power — were occasionally varied by consolatory rec- 
ommendations of one sort and another, — appointment 
of guardians for destitute young persons, sanitary recom- 
mendations, accommodations of travellers at inns, be- 
havior of servants, stigmatizing of romances of chiv- 
alry, and educational schemes. 

Education at home was made fashionable by Philip 



■'■ ! V'-^,,fl : H : ,-i ; ' 




d 



The EscoriaJ. 507 

— a fashion still further popularized by threats of for- 
feiture of estates, banishment, and confiscation in case 
of disobedience. He did not hesitate to reject peti- 
tions peremptorily when it suited his purposes ; and as 
for co-operation between him and the cortes — that 
belonged to the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella. Am- 
biguity, circumlocution, delay, were his delight ; he 
never expressed himself with directness ; he wound and 
twisted in labyrinthine phraseology which might or 
might not mean something ■ and he was master of 
Machiavellian dissimulation. 

The Spaniards were characteristically flattered, how- 
ever, by being called together at all — even to vote 
supplies ; and they fancied themselves a free people in 
spite of the maintenance of a hitherto unknown stand- 
ing army, the germs of which were sown during the 
forty-three years of this reign. 

A body of thirty thousand militia, a corps of sixteen 
hundred horsemen patrolling Andalusia, garrisons and 
fortresses at frequent intervals, twenty companies of 
men-at-arms, and five thousand light cavalry, the 
"guards of Castile," furnished a force whose ready 
mobilization was a constant menace to the dozen 
kingdoms of which the peninsula consisted. Philip 
had but to lift his long finger, and any province could 
be throttled in an instant. 

The greatest architectural monument of this reign is 
an outgrowth of the king's religious enthusiasm. The 
Escorial — from scoria, the dross of iron-mines found 
in the neighborhood — is said to be Saint Lorenzo's grid- 
iron in granite, and arose in consequence of a vow to that 
saint in commemoration of the victory of St. Quentin, 



508 Spain under Philip TI. 

in 1557. Philip bad moved his capital in 1563-64 to 
Madrid, the vicinity of which to this structure, its pure air, 
and its central locality offered to his mind incomparable 
advantages over hoary Toledo or spacious Valladolid. 

A mausoleum, a monastery, a palace, a church, a 
museum, a marvellous reliquary, where the bones and 
limbs of hundreds of saints were devoutly accumulated ; 
a city of corridors, doors, windows, and apartments ; a 
great library, a gigantic picture-gallery, a net-work of 
tanks and towers, a confession-stool for princely humil- 
ity, a village of Hieronymite monks, a town clinging to 
the sides of the mountain-wilderness of the Guaglar- 
ramas, a swarming cloister, an austere hermitage, a for- 
tress, — what was not this wonderful edifice, begun by 
Juan Bautista de Toledo in 1563, and occupying thirty 
years of Philip's life before it was finished ? Aranjuez, 
Segovia, Madrid. Valladolid, all attest that union of mag- 
nificence with simplicity which distinguished Philip's 
architectural taste. And through his spy-glass he 
watched the Escorial as it rose in sober grandeur with 
an interest more intense perhaps than he bestowed 
upon anything else. Delicate marbles of many hues, 
damasks and velvets of Granada, bronze and iron of 
Toledo, exquisite work in steel, gold, and precious 
stones from Milan, gorgeous tapestries from Flanders, 
rare embroideries from the thronging monasteries of 
Spain, cedar, ebony, marvellously tinted woods from 
beyond the seas, masterpieces of Titian and the Italian 
artists — all that money, consummate taste, and bound- 
less dominion could summon, hung, or glistened, or 
blazed with magical brilliancy within these walls. The 
year 1593 saw the completion of the monastery, finished 



The Duh> of Alva. 509 

by Herrera, a pupil of Toledo, after the master's death. 
But no jewels or precious loom-work, or costly frescoes 
could give the immense, cold, gray mass a gleam of 
brightness or grace. It cost six million ducats; it occu- 
pied three-fifths of a square mile ; it had more than a 
thousand pounds of keys, twelve thousand doors and 
windows, sixty-eight fountains, and a dome three hun- 
dred and fifteen feet high ; it swarmed with inestimable 
treasures, gems, saints' bones, oriental manuscripts, 
shrines, paintings, sculptures ; Philip dwelt with his 
niece-wife there, and an arctic radiance seemed to 
shed itself over the icy Leviathan. But it stood -on its 
mountain-side, solitary and cheerless, the " eighth won- 
der of the world," indeed, as the Castilians love to call 
it, but a majestic impersonation of freezing gloom, in- 
capable of ever being sympathetically regarded. 

Philip's fourth queen, Anne of Austria, died four 
years before it was finished, leaving besides other chil- 
dren, as a monument of the clangers of consanguine- 
ous marriages, the imbecile bigot Philip III., who suc- 
ceeded his father. 

The year 1573 saw the end of Alva's six years' 
administration in the Netherlands. 

So accomplished a military chieftain, however, could 
not be utterly dispensed with, and the duke afterwards 
proved an efficient instrument in the conquest of Port- 
ugal, and its union with the crown of Spain. 

Of great military excellence, with skilful and daring 
qualities as a general, a consummate tactician, a formid- 
able antagonist in field and cabinet, of faultless judg- 
ment in his military combinations, keenly and wholly 
foreseeing and calculating upon precisely the points 



510 Spain under Philip II 

where his opponent, Louis of Nassau, would fail, im- 
movable amid the blazing and starving nation around 
him, a commanding figure of cruelty, serene amid immi- 
nent peril, a potent chieftain everywhere except against 
the unconquerable Batavians, — Alva's audacity, invent- 
iveness, and desperate courage rang through Christen- 
dom. His love of tyranny, however, counteracted his 
profound strategy, for the desperation it evoked mad- 
dened millions into furious resistance. His political 
economy was laughed at, for he tried to make a perma- 
nent revenue out of confiscations. A prosperous com- 
monwealth under him became a gaunt mob of rebellious 
oligarchies. Murder, robbery, the death warrant ; an 
appalling apparatus of despotism ; statutes and popu- 
lar constitutions made highways for his feet of iron ; 
indiscriminate massacre, slaughtering in the dark, six 
years of grinding torment, torture, and conflagration; 
forests of gibbets, with bodies dead and alive swinging 
to them brutally in the pestilential air ; dissolution of 
marriages ; gibbeting of corpses that their estates 
might be confiscated ; insolence, grotesque barbarity, 
and fiendish spectacles of market-places turned into 
roaring amphitheatres of lust, fire, and execution: 
what light is there to this black and disordered picture 
of the guilty duke, who, swimming for a life-time in 
blood, was at length, in his blighted old age, brought to 
keep himself alive by milk, which he drew from a 
woman's breast? 

" The Spanish Inquisition, without intermission — 
The Spanish Inquisition has drunk our blood 
The Spanish Inquisition ! may God's malediction 
Blast the Spanish Inquisition and all her brood ! 



The Inquisition. 513 

" Long live the Beggars ! Wilt thou Christ's word cherish — 
Long live the Beggars ! be bold of heart and hand ; 
Long live the Beggars ! God will not see them perish ; 
Long live the Beggars ! oh, noble Christian band ! " 

So sang the Netherlanders, "guilty of the crimes of 
Protestantism and opulence " ; and back thundered the 
" Our Father of Ghent " : 

" Our Father, in heaven which art, 
Grant that this hellish devil may soon depart — 
And with him his Council false and bloody, 
Who make murder and rapine their daily study — 
And all his savage war-dogs of Spain, 
Oh, send them back to the Devil, their father, again. Amen." 

The administration of Requesens (Alva's successor) 
lasted from 1573 to 1576, and pretended to be moderate 
and conciliatory, though it labored under enormous 
difficulties arising from the ruin and bankruptcy in 
which the country had been left by Alva. 

In 1575, Holland and Zealand, from which the Span- 
iards had been almost completely expelled, were united 
under William of Orange, as absolute sovereign, during 
the war. The death of Requesens — a mediocre bigot, 
possessing hardly a tithe of Alva's ability — occurred a 
year later ; but nearly every considerable city in the 
Netherlands — Antwerp, Valenciennes, Ghent, Utrecht, 
Culemborg, Viane, Alost — had been left by him chained 
hand and foot beneath the feet of the Spaniard. 

On the 8th of November, 1576, was concluded the 
memorable "Pacification of Ghent," — a union wrought 
out by the eloquence of Orange between the Protestant 



514 Spain under Philip II. 

provinces of Holland and Zealand and the fifteen Cath- 
olic provinces. It was a league which established mu- 
tual religious toleration among the hitherto inharmonious 
provinces, abolished the Inquisition from all alike, and 
combined the whole nation into a determined unit for 
the expulsion of the Spaniards. 



CHAPTER XXII. 
END OF THE REIGN OF PHILIP II. 

Don Juan of Austria, now thirty-two, succeeded 
Requesens as captain-general, — stealing, as history 
tells us, through Spain and France in disguise as a 
Moorish slave, that he might elude observation. 

His career in the Netherlands was inglorious, its mid- 
dle year being characterized by the so-called " Perpet- 
ual Edict," a compromise which the provinces wrung 
from him with the bitterness of death. It ratified the 
Ghent arrangement, promised removal of soldiery as 
soon as possible, maintenance of the privileges, char- 
ters, and constitutions of the Netherlands ; required an 
oath to uphold the Catholic religion, and recognized 
Don Juan as governor-general. In December, 1577, dis- 
covering that this arrangement was insincere, designed 
as a mere blind to carry out the schemes of Philip, the 
states-general deposed Don Juan, and war, after a brief 
respite, blazed forth afresh. 

A treaty with Queen Elizabeth — the beginning of a 
long and famous connection — was concluded by the 
States in January, 1578, to the boundless pique of the 
imperial bastard. He thundered forth war in French, 
German, and Flemish, dreaming of victory, as well he 

515 



516 Spain under Philip II 

might : a superb soldier himself, the lode-star of twenty 
thousand picked veterans, and begirt by the most re- 
markable military geniuses in Europe — Alexander Far- 
nese, Mansfeld, Mendoza, and Mondragon. 

But both sides being abjectly poor, the war dragged 
wearily on ; and Don Juan — thwarted by Philip's silence 
and eternal delays, out of money, surrounded by innu- 
merable enemies, suspected by the king himself, the 
pestilence making dreadful ravages in his little army, 
disgraced and abandoned, as he said, by the king, in ter- 
tor of the insidious practices of the French (who had 
now entered the country), filled with gnawing melan- 
choly, consumed by fever, tossing on his bed in fantastic 
visions of battles and victories, utterly wrecked in health 
by care, chagrin, and despondency, — breathed forth 
his heroic soul in that very month rendered immortal 
by the battle of Lepanto. 

Philip was suspected of having poisoned him. His 
body was transported to Spain to the king's presence, a 
disembowelled spectre blazing with jewels, balsams, and 
brocades, in perfumed gloves and sparkling insignia of 
the Golden Fleece ; but historians do not tell us that 
Philip was overwhelmed with grief. 

Wonder and compassion will strike all who contem- 
plate this singular career. A fine military commander, 
famous in the Moorish wars, matchless in his Turkish 
successes, accomplished in many languages, fascinating 
in manners, singularly handsome, fluent, and high- 
spirited, a visionary dreaming of impossible sovereign- 
ties, embodying the most enviable gifts of the crusader 
and the wandering knight, Barbara Blomberg's son 
died at thirty-three, baffled, disappointed, broken-hearted. 




VALENCIAN LABORER. 



The JSFethe rtand Butchery. 519 

And over the Pyrenees sat the uxorious Philip spinning his 
innumerable wiles, gathering his complicated spider- 
web of intrigue and death about whomsoever approached 
him, benignly doing the work of half a dozen men in 
his silent cabinet, grasping in his hands chords that 
could wring harmonies or torments from dominions wide 
as the world ; passively gazing upon this noble, dying 
Lion-hearted, so beautiful, so daring, so unfortunate. 

Margaret of Parma's son, Alexander Farnese, a 
nephew of Philip, — a gifted, dangerous, and impas- 
sioned soldier, — sprang into the breach caused by 
the death of his uncle, Don Juan of Austria, and exer- 
cised his great military talents there in a way which 
transcended even the glories of Alva's reign. The 
House of Austria, after producing four princes of great 
ability, — Charles, Philip, Don Juan, and the Prince of 
Parma, — princes whose wonderful careers filled the cen- 
tury from 1500 to 1598, — lapsed into a state of imbe- 
cility and went out in the semi-idiocy and melancholy 
of Philip III. and IV. and Charles II. (1700). 

Alexander Farnese, grandson of Pope Paul III. — edu- 
cated at Alcala with Don Carlos and Don Juan ; a capi- 
tal huntsman, tourneyer, gladiator; husband of the 
spotless Maria of Portugal ; a midnight brawler in his 
father's capital ; a hero of Lepanto, where he grappled 
and captured the treasure-ship of the Moslems ; a dark- 
eyed, side-glancing, sinister-looking, handsome man, 
sumptuously apparelled, princely-mannered, desperate, 
and audacious, — smote the Netherlander hip and thigh ; 
hung, butchered, drowned, and burned like a true Ro- 
man Catholic of that age, expiated his sins by torch- 



520 Spain under Philip II 

light mass, but found his match in the serene, silent- 
working Prince of Orange. 

Holland, Zealand, Gelderland, Ghent, Friesland, 
Utrecht, Overyssel, and Groningen, concluded in Janu- 
ary, 1579, the Union of Utrecht, which was the basis 
of the Dutch Republic and the foundation-stone of two 
hundred years of glory and splendor. It ratified the 
" Ghent Pacification," which still acknowledged Philip, 
yet contracted to expel the foreigner ; carefully abstained 
from religious intolerance ; retained all the ancient con- 
stitutions, charters, and forms ; left upon their ancient 
foundations and with their ancient peculiarities a mass 
of historic sovereignties mutually independent and yet 
unified ; accepted existing civil and political institu- 
tions, and wrought an iron league which, without pre- 
meditation, developed into the Republic of the United 
Netherlands and left the Walloon sovereignties alien- 
ated, down to our time, from their heroic brethren 
of the North. 

This league, by slow and stealthy degrees, grew into a 
solemn declaration of independence and renunciation 
of allegiance to Philip in July, 1581. The Prince of 
Orange accepted the supreme power in Holland and 
Zealand for the term of the war, but in 1582 without 
limitation. 

The "Act of Abjuration," as this declaration was 
called, deposed Philip without establishing formally any 
Republic, maintained a system of hereditary sover- 
eignty mingled with popular institutions to which the 
burghers were attached, devised no special constitution, 
rid the country of a mischievous tyranny, and put an 
end " to the first and true cause of all our miseries," — 



William of Orange. 521 

the Inquisition. That all seventeen provinces did not 
join in this magnetic circle was owing to the ambition 
of certain grandees anxious to uphold the independence 
of their individual states, to religious intolerance, to the 
genius of Farnese whose management prevented a con- 
federation, and to the self-abnegation of William the 
Silent, who refused to become the chief of the United 
States. 

Henry, the Cardinal King of Portugal, having died 
in 1580, the Spaniards under Alva overran the country 
in two months, and Philip received homage as king of 
Portugal at Lisbon, in 1581. 

Italians, Lorrainers, Englishmen, Scotchmen, and 
Spaniards, had long been trying to murder Orange, — 
five attempts were made in two years — and at length a 
small, spindle-shanked, wonderfully courageous Bur- 
gundian, Francis Guion, alias Balthazar Gerard, suc- 
ceeded on a Tuesday morning in July, 1584, in ancient, 
linden-avenued Delft. 

" O, my God, have mercy upon my soul ! O, my God, 
have mercy upon this poor people ! " were William's 
last words as he fell riddled with Gerard's poisoned 
slugs. 

William died in his fifty-second year, leaving eleven 
children by his four marriages (with Anne of Egmont, 
Anna of Saxony — a coarse maniac — Charlotte of Bour- 
bon, and Louisa de Coligny). Two of his sons — Prince 
Maurice of Nassau and the Stadtholder of the Repub- 
lic, Frederic Henry — maintained the undying fame of 
the race. 

Piety, fortitude, serene enthusiasm, perfect disinter- 
estedness, munificence that plunged him into' debt, were 



522 Spain under Philip TI. 

prominent characteristics of the great prince. An inimi- 
table captain, a political genius of the first order, of 
commanding and suggestive eloquence, of an industry 
paralleled by that of Philip alone ; a thorough linguist ; 
a subtle and profound intriguer, who had won over 
Philip's very secretary to transmit to him for ten years 
copies of all his dispatches; a patriot and self-abnegator 
illumined by a divine mission ; an athlete, a philosopher, 
and a Christian, the Prince of Orange was undoubtedly 
the greatest man of his age. All the Netherlands hung 
affectionately about the tomb of " Father William," and 
begirdled it with the living immortelles of their tears 
and memories. 

The duke of Anjou, elected by the united Provinces 
in 1583 duke of Brabant and sovereign of the whole 
country, proved a traitor, and fortunately died in 1584. 
The provinces then, after applying to Henry III. of 
France, turned to " the glorious virgin who then ruled 
England," and pressed the sovereignty upon her. 
While declining the proposed honor, Elizabeth threw 
down the gauntlet to Spain, by the publication of her 
famous manifesto and solemn treaty of alliance with 
the Netherlands, in 1585. Philip, who hated the Prot- 
estant princess with all the venom of a rejected suitor, 
forthwith took measures for operations against England. 
Because Holland was the very threshold of England ; 
because the two countries were so intimately associated 
by position, nationality, religion, and commerce ; be- 
cause the conquest of England had been determined 
upon by Philip after he had conquered Holland ; and 
because England and Protestantism might be annihi- 
lated if Philip once got control of the immense wealth, 



The Earl of Leicester. 523 

spacious ports, and numerous fleet of Holland ; such 
were the reasons that moved the great but eccentric 
queen to help the Dutch. 

The earl of Leicester — famous in romance, intrigue, 
and love; the most picturesque chieftain of the age; 
the man of infinite crimes according to his enemies, 
and of matchless virtues according to Elizabeth ; " a 
rare artist in poison ; " the grandee-favorite of the 
queen, whose calumnies, murders, accomplishments, 
widow-marrying, wife-killing, jewelled apparel, gem- 
pierced ears, magnificence in dress, overgrown figure, 
and subtle blandishments to an infatuated mistress, have 
come down to us vividly depictured in contemporary 
prose — was made lieutenant general of the five thou- 
sand English sent over to the aid of the Dutch. Side 
by side with him stood his nephew, — the very genius of 
poetry and chivalry, an effulgent impersonation of chiv- 
alrous culture, a beautiful apparition with " amber-col- 
ored hair," blue eyes, high-born features, and the soul 
of all knight-errantry in him, the dreamer of Arcadia, 
the friend of Melancthon and William the Silent, the 
star of Astrophel, and son-in-law of Walsingham, the 
pearl-embroidered Adonis in blue gilded armor, who 
flashes on us like a Knight of the Holy Grail, the 
scholar, poet, statesman, — Sir Philip Sidney. 

The skirmish of Zutphen, in 1586, was rendered for- 
ever " to our posterity famous," as Leicester said it 
would be, by the death of Sidney. " Thy necessity is 
even greater than mine," said he, handing the cup of 
water to the wounded soldier. His dying words to 
Robert Sidney were "Love my memory, cherish my 
friends. Above all, govern your will and affections by 



524 Spam under Philip II 

the will and word of your Creator ; in me beholding 
the end of the world with all her vanities." 

Thus beautifully he died, talking of Plato and the 
immortality of the soul, listening to sweet music, and 
remembering all his friends with gifts and rings. 

The blazing bonfires in Cadiz and Lisbon harbors, 
caused by Sir Francis Drake's scuttling and burning two 
hundred and fifty Spanish galleys and transports, gave 
the Spaniards in 1587 a foretaste of the Great Armada 
disaster of the next year, as well as of the pluck of 
English mariners. Leicester's governor-generalship in 
the Netherlands, owing to his unpopularity, the queen's 
double-dealing, and Farnese's tactics, had proved a 
failure, and in January, 1588, he had resigned. 

In 1588, Philip tried to carry out his insolent scheme 
against England. The invincible Armada — an assem- 
blage of one hundred and forty ships in ten squadrons, 
with thirty thousand men on board, commanded by the 
" golden " duke of Medina-Sidonia — set sail from 
Coruna toward the last of May, 1588, with Calais harbor 
as its destination. Galley-slaves, grandees, mendicant 
friars, soldiers, inquisitors, bands of music, great cas- 
tellated galeasses, mighty galleons, gilded saints, heavy 
cannon, thousands of sailors, servants, and adventurers, 
store-ships, caravels, familiars of the Inquisition, huge 
monster vessels, driven by three hundred slaves a-piece 
— such were the incongruous elements of the armament 
that floated out amid the tempests of the Bay of Biscay 
that May of T588. 

A girdle of beacon lights shone along the coast of 
England and flashed the news that the Spaniards were 
coming. Drake, Frobisher, Howard, and Hawkins, 



^ IG I if 
km wjv . 

If j f )' ' 

:M f 




The Spanish Armada. 527 

with their sixty-seven light and swift ships, — as won- 
derfully alert on the sea as the Moors were with their 
flash-and-go horse in the plains of Andalusia, — hovered 
about, sunk, cannonaded, boarded, destroyed, utterly 
discomfited the huge, indolent-sailing Spanish ocean- 
palaces, and brought to utter grief the vast half-moon 
of the Spanish Armada. The English darted to and 
fro like infuriated hornets, and grappled the galleons 
with a grim determination to sink them or be sunk. 
Their decks were thronged with patricians eager to 
immortalize themselves — Raleigh, Willoughby, William 
Hatton, Cecil, Oxford, Brooke, Noel, Northumberland, 
Cumberland; and added to these came enormous "float- 
ing volcanoes " at night, dazzling the pitchy darkness 
with unutterable light and fire, and shattering the Span- 
ish hulks to flinders. Howard " plucked their feathers 
little by little," as he said, between July 31st and 
August 9. 

The Armada, utterly routed, crippled, and thunder- 
riven by the English broadsides, swept panic-stricken 
through the North sea into the icy and inhospitable 
waters of Scotland and Norway. A series of tempests 
providentially aided the English, who had to abandon 
the chase ; and perhaps ten thousand alone, out of the 
thirty thousand men who had sailed forth, ever drank 
Spanish wine or heard a Spanish mass again. The sea 
was full of Spanish grandees and Spanish ducats. 
Eighty-one out of one hundred and forty vessels per- 
ished or were captured, while the feeling in Spain may 
be argued from the fact that a Lisbon merchant, who ven- 
tured to laugh at the wreck of the Armada,was gibbetted. 

The murder of the Guises, the assassination of Henry 



528 Spain under Philip II. 

III. of France, last of the Valois, and the claims of 
Henry of Navarre to the throne, — fiery Gascon Hugue- 
not that he was, — had plunged France into an ocean of 
anarchy, league, and counter-league. Philip himself 
claimed the throne through the Infanta, his daughter, 
grand-daughter of Henry II., and the horrible rumoi 
circulated, " that if the Salic law could not be set aside 
in her favor, he meant to get a dispensation and marry 
her himself," thus confirming his right to the crown, in 
virtue of his wife. 

The death of the Prince of Parma, in 1592, pursued 
as he was by the malice, ingratitude, and suspicions of 
his royal uncle, gave a severe blow to the Spanish 
cause in the Low Countries, hardly bettered by his suc- 
cessor, the Archduke Ernest, brother of the Emperor 
Rudolph. 

The hard-faced, antique-looking Count Fuentes, — a 
grizzled and leathern-skinned reminiscence of Alva, 
one of those alert, sagacious, saffron-colored, sinister- 
eyed apparitions, in Brussels point and Milan armor, 
that look out of the corners of their eyes at us from 
Velasquez's portraits — succeeded the archduke in 

r 595- 

Another of the Habsburgers — the Archduke Cardi- 
nal Albert, of Toledo — arrived in the Netherlands in 
1596, as governor-general in Fuentes' stead. 

About this time, a combined expedition of Dutch and 
English forces attacked the Spanish war-ships at Cadiz, 
and planted the flag of the republic on the fortress of 
Cadiz itself, succeeded by the capitulation and sacking 
of the city. 

Philip's second armada, fitted out for the conquest of 



Treaty of Vervins. 529 

Ireland, went to the bottom in 1596-7, by aid of the 
same succoring tempests that had shattered the armada 
of 1588, and with it 5,000 men. Mexico was literally 
transmuted into golden ducats, wafted to Spain by vast 
Indiamen for the Danae-tub of Philip's Fountain of 
Perpetual Schemes. No difficulty, no defeat baffled his 
purpose. His gigantic villainy in repudiating his enor- 
mous debts under the guise of religion, in 1596, beg- 
gared the archduke governor-general, and produced "a 
general howl of indignation and despair upon every 
exchange, in every counting-room, in every palace, in 
every cottage in Christendom." 

The treaty of peace between France and Spain, — 
war had been proclaimed by Henry in 1595, — -signed 
at Vervins in May, 1598, almost contemporaneously 
with the famous Edict of Nantes in favor of the Prot- 
estant subjects of Henry IV., was as disgraceful to 
Philip as the opening treaty of his long reign at Cateau 
Cambresis, in 1559, had been humbling to France. 
Philip conceded nearly everything that Henry de- 
manded. The same spring he transferred the Nether- 
lands to his daughter Isabella and her intended hus- 
band, the cardinal archduke Albert, as tranquilly as if 
the whole matter were an ordinary business transaction. 
The Infante Philip, his only son, married Margaret of 
Austria by proxy at the same time, — another specimen 
of that frequent intermarriage of relations so popular 
between Spain and Austria, and which everywhere spun 
threads of madness, idiocy, depravity, and melancholy 
through the whole connection. 

Philip himself, now seventy-one and in the forty-third 
year of his reign, was this year smitten with the loath- 



530 Spain under Philip II 

some disease by which he was soon to expiate physi- 
cally the enormities of his life. He lingered from June 
to September in horrible agony, — devoured alive by in- 
numerable vermin which had developed in myriads out 
of his gouty and corrupted joints, and in exquisite ma- 
lignity surpassed every deviltry ever invented by the 
Inquisition. Seeing his end approaching, extreme unc- 
tion and the Lord's Supper were administered to him 
repeatedly, at his own request; he rubbed his sores 
with the knee-bones of saints ; he discoursed with edi- 
fication on sacred subjects ; he provided thirty thousand 
masses to be said for his soul ; and made minute mil- 
liner-like directions about his funeral obsequies. 

His last words were, " I die like a good Catholic, in 
faith and obedience to the Holy Roman Church " 
Then a paroxysm passed over the bedful of crowned 
misery, and Philip was no more. 

Thus ended the absolute despotism of Philip II., — a 
despotism fountained and centred in him, with absolute 
power to nominate and remove every judge, magistrate, 
military or civil officer, every archbishop, bishop, and 
ecclesiastic of whatever sort ; a reign consumed " in 
accomplishing infinite nothing ; " in extinguishing free 
institutions and venerable municipal privileges ; in nul- 
lifying legislative and deliberative bodies ; in eluding 
justice and constitutional right of every sort; in in- 
famous self-indulgence, criminality, and assassination ; 
in kindling everlasting war in neighboring countries ; 
in corrupting, bribing, and espionaging half of contem- 
porary Europe ; in murdering thousands of human 
beings ; in generating the noisome and gigantic pesti- 
lence of an omnipresent Inquisition ; and in organized 



Philip's Character. 531 

terrorism, hostility of class to class, and extermination 
of the popular will. 

The most valuable part of the population of this 
world-empire was " accursed " and excommunicated. 
Philip himself was the kingdom concentrated in one 
all-powerful personality. Dependencies girdling the 
globe hung by a thread of iron to a middle-sized, yel- 
low-haired fanatic, who with horrible monotony of evil 
poisoned the world for seventy-one years, and died 
having a memory compounded of every evil-smelling 
thing under the sun. 

He lived and breathed murder, as we know by his 
attempted killing of Elizabeth, Henry of Navarre, and 
John of Olden-Barneveld, the great burgher; by his 
assassination of Egmont, Hoorne, and William the Si- 
lent ; by his suspected assassination of his own and, at 
that time, only son, Don Carlos, and his nephew, Don 
Juan of Austria ; by his condemning millions to death 
in the Netherlands by one edict ; by the grinning skull 
of the chief-justice of Aragon fixed for years in a Span- 
ish market-place ; and by the assassination of his sec- 
retary, Escovedo. Countless families were reduced by 
him to beggary; and confiscations, extortions, black- 
mail had become commonplaces. 

It is also difficult to conceive how a man could be so 
false, so utterly hypocritical, mendacious, and faithless 
as Philip was, — serene incarnation of passionless evil 
as history shows him to be. Illiterate, petty-minded, 
and full of cant, he could not spell, tell the truth, or be 
sincere, if it had cost him his life ; nor did he scruple 
for his own nefarious purposes to take twenty-five per 



532 Spain under Philip II 

cent of the $12,000,000 of precious metals annually 
dug out of the mines of Mexico. He governed a 
colossal realm composed of- the most heterogeneous 
elements, and separated in every possible way, — in 
language, locality, color, institutions. With Peru, Mex- 
ico, Brazil, and the Antilles, from Cape Horn to Labra- 
dor ; the seventeen Netherland provinces ; the twelve 
kingdoms of Spain and Portugal ; the two Sicilies ; 
Milan ; portions of Tuscany ; Barbary ; Guinea ; the 
African coast southwards, and the Indian peninsulas 
and archipelagos ; the Philippine and Molucca Islands ; 
with the grand-duchy of Florence, and the republic of 
Genoa as virtual vassals, titular king of England, 
Wales, and Ireland, and claiming the kingdom of 
France through his daughter, Philip was a universal 
monarch indeed. 

His swarming armies, his perpetual levies, and con- 
tributions, his habitual violation of good faith in repud- 
iating his debts, his twelve millions of Spaniards and 
Portuguese embraced in the united peninsula, the in- 
dustrial and scientific civilization exhibited by his 
"accursed" troops of Jews, Moors, and Dutch, his 
holy office spread over two hemispheres, his indom- 
itable soldiers, his hierarchy of archbishops (11) and 
bishops (62) with their hold on one-third of the entire 
income of Spain and Portugal, — all his marriages, in- 
heritances, gifts, and cruelties : all this and much more 
proved of no avail ; he could not conquer the Nether- 
lands ; he never did succeed fully and permanently in 
anything ; he never had one moment's freedom from 
suspicion; he was hated, dreaded, despised; he was 




PEASANTS IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF MADRID. 



Death of Philip II 535 

utterly outgeneralled by Henry of Navarre and the vir- 
gin queen ; his great fleets were scattered like feathers ; 
his armies mutinied ; and he died a wreck of disap- 
pointed and ignoble ambition, a striking monument of 
a life lived almost utterly in vain. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

FROM THE DEATH OF PHILIP II., TO THE ACCES- 
SION OF THE BOURBONS. 

REIGNS OF PHILIP III., PHILIP IV., AND CHARLES II. 

WE have devoted a more extended attention to 
the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, Charles 
V., and Philip II., because they form a cluster of reigns 
the most important within the cycle of Spanish his- 
tory. Spain became united and consolidated under the 
Catholic kings ; it became a cosmopolitan empire un- 
der Charles ; and in Philip, austere, bigoted, and com- 
manding, its height of glory was reached. Thenceforth 
the Austrian supremacy in the peninsula — the star of 
the House of Habsburg — declined, until a whiff of 
diplomacy was sufficient to extinguish its lights in the 
person of the childless and imbecile Charles II. 

Three reigns — Philip III. (1598-162 1), Philip IV. 
(1621-1665), and Charles II. (1665-1700) — fill this 
century of national decline, full as it is of crowned 
idiocy, hypochondria, and madness, the result of inces- 
tuous marriages, or natural weakness. The splendid and 
prosperous Spanish empire under the emperor and his 
son — its vast conquests, discoveries, and foreign wars, 
— becomes transformed into a bauble for the caprice of 
-favorites, under their successors. 

536 



A Retrospect. 537 

From the boundless confusion, degradation, and dis- 
solution of the very forms of government which took 
place at the death of Enrique IV., in 1474, Spain had, 
at the beginning of the sixteenth century, passed to a 
point where it towered far above all the kingdoms of 
Europe in definite aims and in thorough consolidation 
of the elements of power. The union of Castile and 
Aragon, and the conquest of the Mahometans, had 
made the land one. A nation, the most highly individ- 
ualized and tumultuous of the middle ages, rent by the 
controversies of an ambitious nobility, an uncontrolled 
clergy, and the innumerable communities which formed 
petty republics in themselves within its borders, sud- 
denly abandons its strifes, and follows the path of law 
and order as developed in a wise administration, a care- 
ful police, a vigorous system of justice, and educational 
establishments of sufficient range. The crown became 
the commanding power in the land. The battle-fields 
of Italy, the immense fields of western exploration, 
became the theatres of a restless energy hitherto de- 
voted to civil war. The marriage of Juana with Philip 
the Handsome, brought Spain in the sixteenth century 
into intimate contact with the house of Habsburg ; and 
thus it entered into the vast aggregate of European 
states. Its isolated position — a huge promontory of 
south-western Europe, severed by the Pyrenees from its 
neighbors, — no longer worked against it. Its blood, 
seething with Phenician, Carthaginian, Roman, Ger- 
manic, and Asiatic influences, mingled many of the 
best elements of the north, east, and west, and prepared 
it for a career of unexampled scope under the emperor. 
Its contact with the Netherlandish, Italian, and Ger- 



538 Reign of Philip III. 

man dominions of Charles V., might have been of infi- 
nite benefit, had not the Reformation placed it in an 
attitude of rigid hostility to the great European federa- 
tion into which it had just entered. Thereafter, as in 
the times of the Moors, its wars all became religious 
wars, — the narrowest and most soul-sterilizing of all, — 
whether against the union of Smalkalde, the rebellious 
Netherlands, Elizabeth of England, the Grand Turk, 
the African Beys, or the Aztecs, the Incas, and the 
Araucanians of Chili. This attitude towards the rest 
of the world was due to the bigotry of the Habsburg- 
ers, and in this attitude of crystallized hostility, of un- 
impressionable fanaticism, of non-progression, and un- 
enlightenment, Spain has ever since remained. The 
seven centuries of conflict with Islam were succeeded 
by nearly as many with "Luther and Calvin. 

Both Charles's and Philip's highest ambition ran in 
the double line of giving Spain the dominant place 
in the European hierarchy, and maintaining victoriously 
the unity of the Catholic faith. They did not struggle 
in vain. For two generations Spain was the first power 
in the world, and it is due to its influence that, the 
Reformation was discredited and expelled from France, 
Italy, Bavaria, Austria, Poland, and the Southern Neth- 
erlands. " And yet what shall it profit a man if he gain 
the whole world and lose his own soul ? " Amid its im- 
measurable wealth, Spain was bankrupt. The gold, and 
silver, and precious stones of the West, emptied them- 
selves into a land the poorest and most debt-laden in 
Europe, the most spiritually ignorant despite the count- 
less churches, the most notorious for its dissolute nobil- 
ity, its worthless officials, its ignoble family relations, 



Retrogression. 541 

its horrible moral aberrations pervading all grades of 
the population; and all in vain. The mighty fancy, 
the enthusiastic loyalty, the fervid faith of the richly 
endowed Spaniard were not counterbalanced by hum- 
bler but more practical virtues, — love of industry, of 
agriculture, of manufactures. The Castilians hated the 
doings of citizens and peasants ; the taint of the Arab 
and the Jew was on the profession of money-getting. 
Thousands left their ploughs and went to the Indies, 
found places in the police, or bought themselves titles 
of nobility, which forthwith rendered all work dishonor- 
able. The land grew into a literal infatuation with 
miracles, relics, cloisters, fraternities, pious foundations 
of every description. The church was omnipotent. 
Nobody cultivated the soil. Hundreds of thousands 
lived in the convents. Begging soup at the monastery 
gates, — such is a type of the famishing Spain of the 
seventeenth century. In economic, political, physical, 
moral, and intellectual aspects, a decay pervaded the 
peninsula under the later Habsburgers, such as no civil- 
ized nation has ever undergone. The population de- 
clined from ten millions under Charles V. (Charles I. of 
Spain) to six millions under Charles II. The people had 
vanished from hundreds of places in New Castile, Old 
Castile, Toledo, Estremadura, and Andalusia. One 
might travel miles in the lovely regions of the South, 
without seeing a solitary cultivated field or dwelling. 
Seville was almost depopulated. Pecuniary distress at 
the end of the seventeenth century reached an unexam- 
pled height ; the soldiers wandered through the cities 
begging ; nearly all the great fortresses from Barcelona 
to Cadiz were ruinous ; the king's servants ran away 



542 Reign of Philip 111. 

because they were neither paid nor fed ■ more than 
once there was no money to supply the royal table • the 
ministers were besieged by high officials and officers 
seeking to extort their pay long due ; couriers charged 
with communications of the highest importance lin- 
gered on the road for lack of means to continue their 
journey. Finance was reduced to tricks of low deceit 
and robbery. Moneys sent to private individuals from 
America were seized and appropriated; the value of 
the government paper fell twenty-five per cent.; coin 
was debased in a frightful manner ; the people were 
forced to deliver up good securities in exchange for 
worthless certificates; churches and monasteries were 
plundered in spite of the rooted bigotry, and taxes 
increased so fearfully that a bushel of salt rose once 
from thirty or forty reals, to three hundred and twenty- 
one reals. 

The idiocy of the system of taxation was unpar- 
alleled. Even in 1594 the cortes complained that the 
merchant, out of every one thousand ducats capital, 
had to pay three hundred ducats in taxes ; that no ten- 
ant-farmer could maintain himself, however low his rent 
might be; and that the taxes exceeded the income of 
numerous estates. Bad as the system was under Philip 
II., it became worse under his Austrian successors. 
The tax upon the sale of food, for instance, increased 
from ten to fourteen per cent. Looms were most pro- 
ductive when they were absolutely silent. Almost the 
entire household arrangements of a Spanish family 
were the products of foreign industries. In the begin- 
ning of the seventeenth century, five-sixths of the do- 
mestic and nine-tenths of the foreign trade were in the 



A Rampant Church. 548 

hands of aliens. In Castile, alone, there were one hun- 
dred and sixty thousand foreigners, who had gained 
complete possession of the industrial and manufactur- 
ing interests. " We cannot clothe ourselves without 
them, for we have neither linen nor cloth ; we cannot 
write without them, for we have no paper," complains a 
Spaniard. Hence, the enormous masses of gold and 
silver annually transmitted from the colonies passed 
through Spain into French, English, Italian, and Dutch 
pockets. Not a real, it is said, of the thirty-five mil- 
liens of ducats which Spain received from the colonies 
in 1595, was found in Castile the following year. 

In this indescribable retrogression, but one interest 
in any way prospered — the church. The more agri- 
culture, industry, trade declined, the more exclusively 
did the Catholic clergy monopolize all economic and 
intellectual life. Innumerable families lived on the 
gifts of their numerous clerical members. One son at 
least, out of every burgher and peasant family, had to 
be immolated to the church, that the others might not 
actually starve ; at least one daughter was doomed to 
the veil, to justify her relatives in asking a crust at the 
convent refectory • and the father himself, gladly united 
with one of the brotherhoods for his self-preservation. 
Another part of the population wandered around as 
servants, among the palaces of the grandees, them- 
selves living on the glories of an irrecoverable past and 
the favor of the government. In many provinces there 
were more cut-purses, smugglers, and beggars, than arti- 
sans. And the keener the distress, the more the people 
shrank from exerting themselves, and the more power- 
ful became the tendencies to superstition and idleness, 



544 Reign of PhilijJ III. 

Singularly enough, along with this crushing humilia- 
tion of the material interests of Spain, went the most 
brilliant intellectual development. The age of Philip 
II., of Philip III., and Philip IV., from 1550 to 1665, 
saw an astounding multitude of poets, historians, dram- 
atists, artists, spring up as if by magic, out of the con- 
quest of Granada, the Italian campaigns, and the mar- 
vellous deeds of the conquerors of the New World. 
Garcilasso de la Vega (1503-36), and Hurtado de Men- 
doza (1503-75), — the one a charming ecloguist, the 
other an elegant historian and reputed founder of the 
gusto picaresco in Spain, — illustrated the reign of 
Charles V. Then followed, in the early part of his 
reign and in the next, a series of the most delightful 
chroniclers — Cortes, Gomara, the charming old sol- 
dier Bernal Diaz, Oviedo, Las Casas — telling the won- 
ders of Mexico, Peru, and the Indian islands, fit con- 
tinuers of the glowing narratives of Columbus. More 
than twenty poets, many of distinguished eminence, 
surrounded Philip II. Here find a place the eloquent 
religious poet, Fray Luis de Leon (15 28-1 591), who 
spent many years of his life in the cells of the Inquisi- 
tion ; the immortal Castilian Cervantes (1547-1616). 
author of Don Quixote, Lope de Vega (1562-1635), 
the author of eighteen hundred plays and four hundred 
autos, which were so popular that one of them found 
its way to the seraglio of Constantinople ; and the 
eminent, religious, and didactic prose-writer Quevedo 
(1 580-1 645), the victim of the cruelties of the infamous 
Count Duke Olivares. 

Between 1588 and 1682 lived and labored the cele- 
brated Spanish painters Ribera, Velazquez, and 
Murillo. 



A Literary Age. 545 

The effect of removing the capital to Madrid from 
1563, stimulated dramatic art especially, caused the con- 
struction of theatres, and gave wide scope to the pecu- 
liar religious representations and sacred dramas in 
which the Spanish poets delighted. Calderon de la 
Barca (1600-1681) was the last of the great poets, and 
like Lope entered the church. 

The reign of Philip IV., who was himself a poet, 
like Jayme of Aragon, was the most fruitful age of 
Spanish dramatic literature. It would require pages 




Lope de Vega. 

even to enumerate the lyric, satirical, elegiac, pastoral, 
epigrammatic, didactic, and descriptive poets of the 
Austrian era ; the graceful ballad-writers, with the uni- 
versal love of ballads ; the composers of romantic fic- 
tion — chivalrous, pastoral, humorous, historical, and 
serious ; the cultivators of forensic eloquence, and cor- 
respondence ; the great historians (Zurita, Morales, 



546 Reign of Philip II and III. 

Mariana, Sandoval, Herrera, Argensola, Solis) ; the di- 
dactic prose writers, and the dramatists. 

In one hundred and fifty years, however, all this radi- 
ance had come and gone. The overthrow of institu- 
tions in the war of the communeros under Charles V., 
the virtual slavery of the one hundred millions of 
people whom Philip II. ground under the iron heel of 
the Inquisition, the stifling incubus of Jesuit rule, the 
expulsion of the six hundred thousand Moriscoes, the 
most valuable part of the population, under Philip III., 
the seizure of Jamaica by the English, the cession of 
Roussillon to France, and the independence of Portugal 
in 1640, the repudiation of much of the public debt, 
the long and disastrous minority of Charles II., with 
the deplorable ruin and dilapidation ensuing ; each of 
these things was a step downward of that once magnifi- 
cent House of Austria. 

The disgraceful credulity of the Dark Ages was revived 
in the spectacle of the last member of this house being 
exorcised for witchcraft. 

Insignificant Portugal triumphantly maintaining her- 
self against, nay, actually invading, the universal empire 
of Spain ; Catalonia in successful revolt for thirteen 
years ; milliards of reals spent on the subjugation of 
the Netherlands, and yet Spain, compelled by the peace 
of Westphalia, in 1648, to recognize their independence 
and the equal rights of heretics in Germany ; how deep 
a degradation is here ! 

England under Cromwell, France under Louis XIV., 
were meanwhile contemporaneously expanding, grow- 
ing in power • advancing on all sides, by land and by 
sea, at the expense of Spain. Franche-Comte fell to 




JAR MERCHANT. MADRID 



Decadence. 549 

France in a fortnight ; the strongest^fortresses in Cata- 
lonia capitulated in a few clays. The most warlike of 
nations had in one hundred and fifty years transformed 
itself into the feeblest, the most indifferent to glory and 
honor. The northern provinces under Charles II., 
were defenceless against the French, and the South 
trembled at the thought of a second barbarian conquest 
from Africa. Raw boys and gray-haired weaklings 
formed the majority in the Spanish regiments. Even 
under Philip II. the naval power had gone to naught. 
Instead of developing uninterruptedly, hand in hand 
with the huge colonial system, it at last sank to thir- 
teen galleys, seven of which were hired from Genoa ; 
the art of ship-building was lost ; the magazines, arse- 
nals, and workshops at the sea-ports, stood empty ; and 
Italy, France, and England, furnished the hired ships, 
to bring the very tobacco from Havana. A kingdom 
to whose very existence a navy was indispensable, — 
whose Netherlandish, Italian, and colonial possessions 
could not be ■ communicated with without ships, — 
shamelessly neglected the very art most essential to its 
safety. Its trade with America fell into the hands of 
foreigners. Pirates from Barbary were the terror of 
the Spanish seas ; the country became uninhabitable 
for miles inland along the Mediterranean ; filibusters 
ravaged the transatlantic colonies; under Charles II., 
Cuba, St. Domingo, Nicaragua, and New Granada, year 
in year out, were plundered by them; the great city of 
Carthagena was subdued, and Vera Cruz surprised and 
burned. 

This brief sketch may serve to show how profoundly 
Spain had sunk in the two centuries of Habsburg rule. 



550 Reign of Philip II. and III. 

It lay a corpse, ove* which hovered the vulture of the 
House of Austria — not an emblem of victory, but a 
symbol of death. 

The reign of Philip III. is pitiably deficient in inter- 
est. His accession to power was at once signalized by 
the transference of the reins of government to the 
hands of the favorite, the Duke of Lerma, in terror of 
whom and his formidable wife, Philip and his queen 
lived for many years. Philip was so weak, that when look- 
ing over the portraits of all the daughters of the Arch- 
duke Charles, that he might select his future wife from 
among them, he alleged, that the princess who should 
meet with his father's approbation, would be the most 
beautiful in his eyes — a filial excellence altogether 
admirable, had it shown anything but the most abject 
dread in which he lived towards the terrible Philip II. 

The death of Elizabeth of England in 1603, deprived 
the Netherlands of their mightiest ally, and left them at 
the tender mercies of James I., who abhorred support- 
ing revolted subjects against their sovereign under any 
circumstances. The United Provinces, however, were 
now acknowledged as independent by all countries 
except Spain. In 1602 they had established the first 
East India Company ; their resources were inexhaust- 
ible, and the Dutch fleets filled the treasury with the 
spoils of the Spanish treasure-ships. The treaty of 
Antwerp, in 1609, secured the acknowledgment of the 
admission of the United Provinces into the European 
commonwealth. 

Gentle and humane as Philip was, his bigotry got the 
better of him in his expulsion of the Moriscoes —bap- 
tized though recreant infidels — from their native land 



The Moriscoes. 551 

to Africa. Two archbishops urged their complete ex- 
tirpation from the soil of Spain. They had settled in 
Valencia in thousands, and were much the most desir- 
able part of the population, being skilled artisans, agri- 
cultural laborers, miners, and manufacturers. As a 
last insult to them, it was proposed that six families in 
every hundred should be detained temporarily by the 
lords to whom they were vassals, in order that they 
might teach the Christian inhabitants the management 
of the drains, aqueducts, irrigating canals, rice planta- 
tions, and sugar works, which had been almost exclu- 
sively in the hands of these descendants of the Moors. 
From six hundred thousand to one million of the most 
industrious and ingenious subjects of Spain were cru- 
elly torn from their homes, and transported to Africa, 
where thousands of them, as in the earlier case of the 
Jews of the fifteenth century, were plundered or perished. 
One hundred thousand are reputed to have perished 
within a few months of their expulsion from Valencia. 

Lerma enormously increased the tax on the necessa- 
ries of life ; the internal prosperity of the countiy re- 
ceived its death-blow by this emigration ; the mal-ad- 
ministration of the favorite exasperated the people ; a 
prime minister had been so long unknown in Spain, that 
whatever he did was regarded with suspicion ; and his 
elevation of Rodrigo de Calderon, a menial in his 
household, to the position of favorite's favorite, put the 
climax to the discontent. 

Spain and Austria were rescued, in 1610, from the 
impending danger of a confederation organized against 
them on the part of Henry IV., by the dagger of Ravail- 
lac. The illustrious king fell a victim to assassination. 



552 



Reign of Philip III, 



In 1 6 13, Philip became involved in the eternal dis- 
putes and hostilities of the Italian princes of Mantua 
and Savoy. His interests there were represented by 
Villa Franca, governor of Milan, Bedmar, ambassador 
to Venice, and the duke of Ossuna, viceroy of Naples. 

Bedmar's indignation with Venice, resulted in the con- 
spiracy immortalized in Otway's " Venice Preserved." 
Ossuna won himself a fantastic celebrity under Philip 




Philip III. 

II., by so extravagantly executing the king's order to 
send corn from Naples to Spain that he " produced 
plenty in Spain and famine in the kingdom of Naples." 
Suspected of the desire to convert Naples into an inde- 
pendent principality for himself, he was recalled and 
disgraced. 

Philip's affection for his all-powerful minister gradu- 



A Bigot and Voluptuary* 553 

ally chilled, more especially when by one of the theat- 
rical incongruities of the Spanish church system, Ler- 
ma succeeded in donning a cardinal's hat, and Philip 
came to regard him with reverential awe and dread. 
The cardinal-duke vigorously opposed being degraded, 
but was forced to retire to a country-seat in 1618, 
whilst his arrogant favorite was arrested. The last 
years of Philip's life resound with echoes from Ger- 
many, where the Thirty Years' War had broken out. He 
is said to have died broken-hearted over the discovery 
of the unfortunate condition into which Spain had 
fallen, and his own helplessness to aid her. A pro- 
found melancholy preyed upon him, and though Spain 
still retained possession of the Duchy of Milan, the 
kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia, and the for- 
tresses on the African coast, her state seemed to him 
hopeless, and he died (162 1) "a curse to the nation he 
governed." 

One of his daughters had married the king of France, 
another became queen of Hungary. Of his three 
sons, Philip, Carlos, and Ferdinand, cardinal arch- 
bishop of Toledo, the first succeeded him as Philip IV., 
(1621-1665). 

The life of Philip IV., lasted sixty years, forty-four 
of which were passed in the cares and responsibilities 
of royalty. Almost uninterrupted war kept his long- 
reign in a ripple of excitement from its beginning to its 
close. A bigot and a voluptuary, " Philip the Great," as 
Spanish adulation dubbed him, soon left the duties of a 
sovereign to the favorite Olivares, the count-duke of 
the great family of the Guzmans. Olivares began by 
fining Lerma for malversation, executing Calderon for 



554 Reign of Philip I V. 

a murder of which he was believed innocent, and throw- 
ing Ossuna into prison, where he died of disease. He 
renewed war with the United Provinces, sought the alli- 
ance of the emperor, and prevented England from inter- 
fering in behalf of the Palatinate by his project of a 
marriage between the prince of Wales and the Infanta. 
Both in the Indian and American seas, however, the 
fleets of the Netherlands rode triumphant, plundering 
treasure-ships, subduing the greater part of the Portu- 
guese empire in India and Brazil, sacking Lima in Peru, 
taking possession of several of the West Indian island, 
and presenting the spectacle of a handful of half-sub- 
merged amphibii baffling the once boundless resources of 
the united Spanish empire. 

The romantic visit of Charles, prince of Wales, sec- 
onded by the brilliant and volatile duke of Bucking- 
ham, charmed the stately Spaniards by its gallantry : 
but a quarrel between Buckingham and Olivares, and 
the undisguised licentiousness of Charles's companion, 
brought the negotiation to an end, and Charles ended 
by marrying Henrietta of Orleans, daughter of Henry 
IV. of France, and leaving the Infanta to be wedded 
later to the emperor's eldest son, afterwards Ferdinand 
III. 

- The count-duke first meddled in the affairs of the 
Milanese, then in an Italian war originating in the dis- 
puted succession of the duchy of Mantua, then in the 
Dutch and German wars, assisting the emperor against 
Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. In his Dutch intrigues 
he was no match for the accomplished and subtle Rich- 
elieu, prime minister of France, whom the reduction of 
the Huguenots, in 1635, l e ft ample leisure to prepare 




WANDERING MUSICIAN 



An Insurrection. 



557 



for and declare war against Spain on account of an at- 
tack by a Spanish army on the archbishop of Treves. 
Spain was signally successful in expelling the united in- 
vading armies of France and Holland from the Nether- 
lands : on the Pyreneean frontier mutual invasions took 
place, with varying success. A fierce insurrection of 
the Catalans, due to the infraction of one of their im- 




Olivares. 

memorial privileges, in 1640, kept the whole of the 
Spanish forces at bay for thirteen years, — an insurrec- 
tion occasioned by the tyranny of Olivares. Catalonia 
proclaimed itself a republic and claimed the protection 
of France; but the rebellion was subdued in 1652 by 
Don Juan, the king's natural son, after a fifteen months' 



558 Reign of Philip IV. 

siege of Barcelona. The privileges of Catalonia — 
almost the last relics of Spanish liberty, — were ruth- 
lessly destroyed, and a monarchy as absolute as that of 
Turkey rose upon their foundations. In 1640-64 Por- 
tugal threw off the yoke and proclaimed king the duke 
of Braganza as Joa IV., the legitimate descendant and 
representative of her ancient sovereigns. The abject 
impotence of Olivares and his minions was never more 
emphatically displayed than in this memorable transac- 
tion, the result of which he jocularly communicated to 
the king as follows : " The duke of Braganza has run 
stark mad ; he has proclaimed himself king of Portu- 
gal. This folly will bring your majesty twelve millions 
in confiscations ! " 

France meanwhile had overrun the Netherlands ; 
Prince Maurice took Breda • the superb military genius 
of Gustavus Adolphus brought Ferdinand to the brink 
of ruin in Germany, and was thwarted only by the ex- 
traordinary talents of Wallenstein, whom Schiller has 
immortalized ; Gustavus, however, fell heroically at 
Lutzen, and Wallenstein was basely murdered at the 
instigation of Ferdinand. 

Cardinal Richelieu's turbulent career closed in 1642, 
but his Machiavellian slippers were an exact fit for his 
successor, Mazarin. The great Conde was at the head of 
the French armies during the regency of Anne of Austria, 
and carried off the glorious victory of Rocroi over the 
Spaniards and Walloons, — a victory of mournful augury 
for the Spanish sovereignty in the Netherlands. 

Though Olivares had accomplished some good by re- 
voking the profuse grants of previous sovereigns, intro- 
ducing sumptuary regulations, turning out " two-thirds 



Neiherland Independence. 559 

of the locusts in office," and increasing the revenues of 
the crown, his principle was self-adoration and personal 
aggrandizement. Agriculture, commerce, mechanical 
arts, declined pitiably under the profligate extravagan- 
ces of the court. A conspiracy of weaklings and 
women, headed by the queen and the duchess of Mantua, 
wrought his ruin ; and Olivares was exiled. In 1646 
Massaniello's outburst at Naples came near costing 
Spain the loss of her Neapolitan dominions. He was 
a fisherman whose wife had been insulted, and who, in- 
citing a rebellion, overpowered the viceroy and for ten 
days ruled despotically over Naples. 

The final peace with the Netherlands in 1648 secured 
to this long-suffering land the blessings of independence, 
— acknowledged even by Spain, — and the retention 
of its conquests at home and in the West Indies. Dun- 
kirk was taken with England's aid, then under the pow- 
erful administration of Cromwell ; and the English 
wrested Jamaica from Spain as a further drop in the 
bitter cup of humiliation. But the difficulties between 
France and Spain were aided by Anne's affection for 
her brother, smoothed away by the celebrated treaty of 
the Pyrenees, in 1659, and a marriage : Louis XIV. 
was. united with Philip's daughter, Maria Theresa, who 
renounced her rights to the Spanish crown as the eld- 
est daughter of Philip's first wife. By the treaty Spain 
ceded Roussillon and Artois to France, — a further dis- 
memberment, — and France evacuated all her conquests 
in Catalonia and elsewhere. The English war ceased 
with the restoration of Charles II. The Portuguese 
war alone dragged interminably along, till the effective 
battle of Villaviciosa, lost by the Spaniards; after which 



560 Reign of Charles II. 

there is the dramatic scene of Philip's receiving the 
tidings of the defeat, ejaculating, "It is the will of 
God ! " and swooning away. 

This defeat was his finishing blow, for he died shortly 
afterwards (1665), leaving the morbid hypochondriac 
Charles II., as a three-year-old legacy to the nation. 
His queen, assisted by a junta, was named regent. 
Of Philip it has been aptly said that his reign was, next 
to that of Roderic, the most disastrous in the annals of 
Spain. His life was a series of monumental failures 
on which were inscribed in characters of wormwood 
and flame : Catalonia, Roussillon, Jamaica, the Nether- 
lands, Portugal. 

He had several mistresses and numerous descendants 
by them, but of the children of his two lawful wives, 
the queen of France, Margaret of Hungary, and Don 
Carlos (Charles II.), alone survived him. 

The next reign was inaugurated by a weak and jeal- 
ous queen-dowager, who was wholly governed by a 
German Jesuit. This man was the inquisitor-general 
Nitard, who was hated by the nobles as an interloper, 
and more especially by the high-born and spirited Don 
Juan. Hence the beginning of a long period of in- 
trigue and orgy which harassed the whole of Charles's 
reign. Louis XIV. began to develop his passion for 
conquest at the expense of his infant brother-in-law by 
attempting, contrary to all justice, to overrun the Neth- 
erlands. His dream of universal empire was, however, 
brief, for the Triple Alliance between England, the Unit- 
ed Provinces, and Sweden, stayed his ambitious aspira- 
tions. He restored to Spain, by the treaty of Aix-la- 
Chapelle in 1668, most of his recent acquisitions. Don 




ROMAN BRIDGE AT RONDA. 



Charles II 563 

Juan, supported by a powerful faction of nobles, secured 
the honorable dismissal of the Jesuit, who was sent off 
to Rome as ambassador, and obtained a cardinal's hat 
by the queen's influence. Don Juan was made viceroy 
of Aragon, and another favorite — this time a specious, 
handsome, and agreeable page of the duke of In- 
fantado, Fernando de Valenzuelo — took the Jesuit 
father's place. A lover of bull-fights and courter of 
popular favor, it was whispered that his connection with 
his royal mistress — now over fortv — was dishonora- 
ble. During his administration the United Provinces 
were in 1672 reduced almost to despair by the odious 
machinations of Louis, who, having detached Sweden 
and England from the Triple Alliance, rapidly overran 
the country The savior of Dutch independence then 
rose, — William of Orange (afterwards king of Eng- 
land), — who, elected Stadtholder (the chief magistracy of 
the Seven Provinces), stemmed, in conjunction with 
Spain and Germany, the tide of Louis's successes. The 
active-minded Grand Monarque made incursions into 
Catalonia, incited rebellion in Sicily, and further devas- 
tated the Netherlands. 

On the completion of his fourteenth year, — the 
majority prescribed by Spanish law, — Charles II., in 
1675, began to govern in his own right. Tied to his 
mother's apron-strings and overawed by his uncle, the 
stormy-tempered Don Juan, who had now (1676) man- 
aged to get Valenzuelo banished to the Philippine Is- 
lands, the wretched Charles had not force enough to 
say that his soul was his own. His debilitated mon- 
archy sank a step lower at the treaty of Nimwegen, in 
1678, between France and the other European powers, 



564 Reign of Charles IL 

by which Louis retained Franche-Comte, formerly the 
county of Burgundy (till then one of the Netherland 
provinces). The death of Don Juan, in 1679, saw tne 
last glimmer of genius in the Spanish- Austrian branch 
go out. He had alienated the king's affections by his 
harshness to the queen-mother ; had seen his intended 
reforms and improvements in agriculture, commerce, 
and finance brought to naught, and his popularity lost 
by his rigor in punishing peculation, signing a disad- 
vantageous treaty, and arranging a match between 
Charles and the niece of the abhorred Louis XIV. In- 
ternally Spain was rapidly becoming a wreck. The 
nation was on the brink of insolvency, owing to the 
ignorant and incongruous laws regulating commerce, 
the adulteration of the precious metals, the shameless- 
ness of official life, the fires, overflows, and storms that 
ravaged the land, the destruction of the ships in port, 
the unproductiveness of the tempest-beaten corn-fields, 
and the loss of life and property at Seville in an inunda- 
tion. Transatlantic disputes with Portugal about bound- 
ary lines in Brazil • another invasion of Catalonia by 
Louis, in 1689; the French bombardment of Barcelona 
and Alicante by sea ; the capture of Barcelona by Ven- 
dome ; the succession to power of one incapable prime- 
minister after another, to stay the anarchy of the gov- 
ernment and endeavor to hold up the hands of a trem- 
bling monarch who believed himself bewitched, — all this 
grating and hideous discord was relieved by the suave 
harmonies of the Peace of Ryswick, in 1697, by which 
Louis unexpectedly restored to Spain all his conquests. 
So dramatic a magnanimity had its deep-lying cause. 
Charles's known impotence, even after his second mar- 



Philip of Anjou. 565 

riage with Marianne of Neuburg, left the Spanish 
throne open to the French line by virtue of Louis's 
marriage with Maria Theresa, eldest daughter of Philip 

IV. There were several candidates, the most formida- 
ble of whom was the Dauphin of France, as Maria The- 
resa's eldest .son ; then the Emperor Leopold, whose 
mother was the daughter of Philip III., and who was 
further descended from Ferdinand, brother of Charles 

V. ; and lastly, the electoral prince of Bavaria, whose 
mother was a daughter of Philip IV. 

The dauphin's pretensions were vitiated by his moth- 
er's solemn renunciation of all claim to the crown of 
Spain for her issue, for fear that the two kingdoms 
might come to be united in one head, and thus imperil 
the European balance. But renouncing so noble an 
inheritance was no part of Louis's ambitious projects : 
there was the duke of Anjou, Philip, his grandson, who 
would occasion less apprehension to Europe. The im- 
possibility, also, of ever again uniting Germany and 
Spain, brought Leopold to renounce his expectations in 
favor of his second son, the archduke Charles. 

Hence the dismal death-bed of Charles II., surround- 
ed as it was by the spirits of moping melancholy, men- 
tal feebleness, and triumphant superstition, became a 
focus whence radiated innumerable threads of intrigue 
across the Pyrenees and into the forests of Germany. 
Charles himself clung to his Austrian kin ■ the queen 
supported the archduke ; the queen-mother, the prince 
of Bavaria. But the skilful manipulations of Louis's 
ambassador, the Marquis d'Harcourt, eventually turned 
the tables in favor of Philip of Anjou, though Charles 
had previously left his dominions by will to the electo- 



566 Reign of Charles II 

ral prince. A sudden death put an end to the candi- 
dacy of the Bavarian. The dying king, left much with 
his confessor, who was bribed by Louis, turned more 
and more towards France, particularly as Pope Inno- 
cent XII. recommended the selection of the duke of 
Anjou, on condition of his solemnly giving up his 
French expectations. In October, 1700, after a long 
and bitter struggle, Charles, therefore, signed a will in 
favor of Philip, and leaving Spain in the very extremi- 
ties of exhaustion and embarrassment, expired in No- 
vember, 1700. 

To the belief almost universally given to astrology 
and the black arts in Spain, at the end of the seven- 
teenth century, the deeply religious king was no excep- 
tion. He believed himself overshadowed by some 
awful influence of evil, and descended to practices at 
which one can but smile or weep. Pursuing that loath- 
some curiosity concerning things forbidden which was 
hereditary in his house, he descended into the clammy 
vaults of the pantheon of the Escorial, to visit the 
corpses of his ancestors. One after another he had 
their coffins opened, gazed at their decomposed counte- 
nances, and hung with shuddering intensity over the 
ghastly reminiscences of mortality, till, penetrated with 
horror and chilled with cold, he fled from their pres- 
ence, and, it is supposed, hastened his near end by the 
emotion caused bv this revolting scene. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

FROM THE ACCESSION OF THE BOURBONS TO THE 
FRENCH REVOLUTION (1700-1788). 

REIGNS OF PHILIP V., FERDINAND VI., AND 
CHARLES III. 

IT was probably a great blessing for Spain that from 
the bloody War of the Succession (1700-13) a 
Bourbon, and not a Habsburger had come forth victor. 
Philip V. was in some sense a rejuvenation, a personi- 
fication of the lost youth of Spain, the upholder of a 
new system of government, a new scheme of adminis- 
tration, and a new mode of warfare. The measures 
and principles which had raised France under Colbert 
and Richelieu to the most brilliant of European ascen- 
dencies — the vigorous and stirring initiative of a 
united government, the promotion of trade and com- 
merce, the unsparing abolition of abuses, in however 
limited a manner employed by him, at least brought 
Spain from its stagnant condition, opened a period of 
reform, and launched the country, under Ferdinand VI. 
and Charles III., on a career of comparative prosperity. 
Philip's task was a difficult one ; the absolute crea- 
tion of an army and navy, a police, finances, legislation. 
It became indispensable to employ foreigners in nearly 
every branch of the government, at the head of the 

569 



570 Spain under Philip V. 

army, and in the council-chamber. The abolition of 
the special privileges of Aragon, already so rudely 
shaken under Philip II., and the ensuing partial equali- 
zation through the provinces, of contributions for the 
maintenance of the government, threw down the wall 
which for ages had separated and antagonized Castile 
and Aragon. The absolute dominion of the king over 
the whole land, was felt not only in levying and increas- 
ing taxes, and in reforming the laws, but in stimulating 
scientific research ; which had hitherto been unknown to 
Spaniards. " There was nothing in Newton that could 
make one a better logician or metaphysician, and the 
teachings of Aristotle were more in conformity with 
revealed truth than those of Gassendi," was a boast of 
one of their savants. 

Europe saw with amazement, Spain — benumbed, 
motionless, dead — giving evidence of a life and per- 
sistency, a patience and inflexibility, under exhausting 
trial, which, even though accompanied by the loss of 
her Dutch and Italian possessions through the peace of 
Utrecht (1713), showed her in a light more favorable 
than for many years before. 

A conflict with the church — that incarnation of bound- 
less idleness, stupendous superstition, and monstrous 
ignorance that in the midst of the ruin of the nation 
possessed enormous wealth, meddled with the palace, 
the university, and the school alike, and ate out the 
very vitals of the country — began, and was so success- 
ful that the pretensions of the Roman See were clipped, 
the Spanish church even largely emancipated from 
Rome, and the very Inquisition menaced. Unfortu- 
nately Philip fell under the influence of an Italian wife 



A Stimulating Reign. 571 

— Isabella Farnese ; he lapsed into the usual stupor 
and indifference of Spanish kings ; and all the pictur- 
esque stir and movement of the War of the Succession 
seemed to go out of his gloom-smitten life, leaving the 
Inquisition and the ancient abuses for the time trium- 
phant. Injurious interference with Italian politics en- 
sued as soon as the king felt himself strong enough ; 
Naples and Parma were reconquered, but at an extraor- 
dinary sacrifice of men and means. 

A few figures will be pregnant interpreters of the 
Spanish art of governing. An annual income before 
the Italian wars, of two hundred and thirty-five million 
reals, sank to two hundred and eleven millions, against 
an annual expenditure of three hundred and thirty-six 
millions, payments on the public debt being excluded. 
The government was carried on at an expense of seven- 
teen and one-half millions, while the court swallowed 
thirty-seven millions, and the fleet and army, two hundred 
and thirty-five millions. A theatrical Italian campaign 

— an imposing court full of spangled grandees — were 
the main amusement of the controlling classes ; justice, 
security, culture, material welfare, were contemptible 
secondary considerations. 

Still, Philip's reign of forty-six years gave a very 
varied stimulus to the Spanish people. If the old and 
immemorial was not absolutely laid aside, it was 
undermined ; innovation became practicable ; inquiry 
was made whether this state of permanent crusade, of 
general beggary and vagabondage, of callous supersti- 
tion, of idolatrous reverence for the church, was really 
leading to anything ; whether the fashion of the uni- 
verse, or the fashion of Spain, was the more likely to 



572 Spain under Philip V. 

be correct A gleam of doubt as to the infallibility of 
Spanish methods and Spanish traditions timidly pene- 
trated the chinks of the Pyrenees. Contempt for what 
was foreign, absolute exclusion from the outside world, 
had been hitherto the mainspring of political life. The 
misery and humiliation of Charles II. 's reign had failed 
to rouse the inquiry whether Spain could profit by the 
lessons of other lands ; it was left to a stranger to 
mount the throne and make foreign example beneficial 
to this benighted people. 

Of course such a revolution of ancient modes of 
thought went on with painful slowness, as it must do 
in descending from the upper to the lower classes. 
The church still fattened ; the cloisters grew ; ecclesi- 
astical authority was profoundly reverenced ; the most 
important of Philip's ministers, Patifio, had been a 
Jesuit ; and the state was still a secondary affair. 
But Philip kept up his intimacy with the enlightened 
Macanaz, who had fled abroad from the clutches of the 
Inquisition ; he founded the great academy which has 
done so much for Spanish literature and lexicography ; 
and he encouraged foreign artists, scholars, and manu- 
facturers to settle in Spain, while sending some of his 
own subjects abroad to study. Spanish science no 
longer remained a contradiction in terms. Imaginative 
tendencies like those embodied in the multitudinous 
fancies of Lope and Calderon, now exhaled in the cold, 
clear light of eighteenth century criticism : the frost 
of innumerable Boileaus lay on that century. Realities 
emerged out of that confused and complex state in 
which, hitherto, feeling, passion, subjectivity, declama- 
tion had given the tone to Spanish art and poetry ; and 




A RELAY AT JAEfl. 



Seeds of Reform, 



"575 



Spain seemed gradually to recover her consciousness of 
the world of fact. Scientific criticism, economic research, 
comparison between European and peninsular condi- 
tions resulted from the new life brought into the nation. 
The Benedictine monk, Feyjod, fought nobly in be- 
half of his country's enlightenment, ridiculed the prev- 




Philip V. 



alent notions about comets and matters of science, 
made the universities, where the texts had not changed 
since the days of Ximenes, smart for their maintenance 
of the obsolete scholastic philosophy ; and scourged the 
pride, mendicancy, and conservatism of the provinces, 
with caustic yet kindly severity. Thus, under Philip 
V., seeds of reform and regeneration were cautiously 



576 Ferdinand VI. 

though surely scattered, waiting only for propitious cir- 
cumstances to germinate. The old order, without 
being revolutionized, received a gentle but powerful 
shock, which roused men out of the lethargic apathy of 
the Habsburger times, and made them at least curiously 
forebode new things. 

Thus prepared, Spain came, in 1746, under the guid- 
ance of Ferdinand VI. — a small, anxious-minded, 
weakly, hypochondriacal man, of whom nobody ex- 
pected anything for the advancement of the country. 
But the people were mistaken. His pacific and benev- 
olent disposition gave the country thirteen years of 
quiet and happiness. In this brooding period, for the 
first time, the germs sown in the previous reign put 
forth into life ; unfinished enterprise was carried fur- 
ther ; the system of taxation transformed ; the interests 
of the population, of industrial and productive under- 
takings, furthered; roads built; harbors restored; 
intercourse with America regulated ; the purification of 
the law courts, the interest in science and education, 
stimulated. For the first time since Isabella of Castile, 
the government had money, which was employed for 
the good of the commonwealth. The clever minis- 
ters, Ensenada and Carvajal, introduced a noteworthy 
activity into all branches of the public service. The 
destructive farming of the revenues was abolished ; 
the burden of the Alcavala, or tax on food, and of 
indirect taxation, lightened ; the customs system re- 
formed, for the benefit of the agricultural and indus- 
trial classes ; regularity in providing for the interest on 
the national debt, and in the payment of salaries intro- 
duced ; internal communication rendered practicable 
by the construction of highways and the establishment 



Public Security. 577 

of a certain public security ; shipbuilding, increase of 
the marine service, and foreign trade encouraged. Be- 
tween 1737 and 1760, the revenues had increased from 
two hundred and eleven millions (reals) to three hundred 
and fifty-two millions, despite the lightening of the taxes, 
and apart from the immense sums, often amounting to 
five hundred millions, accruing from American sources. 
Instead of a deficit of one hundred and twenty-five mil- 
lions in the expenditures, there was a surplus of eighty- 
five millions. In 1737, the army had cost one hundred 
and eighty-eight millions; in 1760, ninety millions suf- 
ficed. The navy now consisted of forty-four ships of 
the line, fifteen frigates, and twenty-two other ships, 
costing sixty millions instead of fifty-one millions. The 
whole government expenses in 1737 had been eked out 
with the miserable sum of seventeen and one-half mil- 
lions, whereas now, almost that sum was employed in the 
department of justice alone, and the whole expense of 
running the government ran up to seventy-eight millions. 
Of a thorough-going reform of ecclesiastical abuses, 
however, under Ferdinand as under Philip, there was but 
little talk. In 1749, the statistics show one hundred and 
eighty thousand persons belonging to the clerical class, 
among whom one hundred and twelve thousand belonged 
to orders. The same numbers held good at the begin- 
ning of the seventeenth century, so that at least the 
clergy had not increased in proportion to the rest of 
the population, which had grown a million and a half. 
The extent of the domain of the church was, however, 
still prodigious. It enjoyed a revenue of three hundred 
and fifty-nine millions — a sum equal to the entire reve- 
nue of the state. Ensenada told the king that " the 



578 Charles TIL 

monstrous number of monks and clerics was highly inju- 
rious to the state, that the councils, and even the popes, 
had declared that the only method of obtaining virtuous 
monks and nuns was, to permit but a small number of 
each." But opinions were of little avail. The bishops 
and chiefs of orders went on as before, giving the finish- 
ing touch in affairs of state, and even declaring, in junta 
assembled, that the state was not obligated to pay the 
debts incurred in the previous reign. However, the 
famous concordat of 1753 was an important victory for 
Spain over Rome. By this agreement the ancient 
Spanish privilege, that the crown must supervise church 
appointments, was re-established, and the nominations 
from Rome reduced from twelve thousand to fifty-two. 
The one thousand victims of Inquisitorial torment in 
the previous reign were reduced to ten only under 
Ferdinand. The Jesuits burned with indignation at the 
satire of "Brother Gerund," a remarkable work by 
Father Isla, condemned, indeed, by the Inquisition, but 
universally read and appreciated for its truth and wit. 
A band of clever scholars appeared ; natural science 
was cautiously cultivated ; and everywhere progress 
was visible. 

The accession of Charles III. to the throne, in 1759, 
after having already gained invaluable experience in his 
five-and-twenty years' reign as king of Naples, gave 
admirable fruition to all these dimly-working agencies. 
Well-educated in history and mathematics, and full of 
the spirit of French and Italian literature, full of inter- 
est, also, for scientific questions though fervently ortho- 
dox in his religious beliefs, he had gained insight into 
the principles and policy of government, and saw that 



A Bourbon Alliance. 



579 



church and state must be divorced if either was to 
thrive. He resented the illegalities of the inquisitor- 
general, who looked upon his office as co-equal with the 
crown. In 1762 he compelled all papal promulgations 




Charles III. 

with regard to Spain to be first submitted to the crown 
for its sanction. His unhappy hatred of England and 
his ambition, however, entangled him in the family alii- 



580 Charles III 

ance of the Bourbons, and caused him in the first years 
of his government to suffer a humiliating defeat. But 
an era in which Pombal was working so powerfully 
against the Jesuits of Portugal, and Frederic the Great 
was so gloriously upholding the cause of enlightenment 
in Germany, could not but affect Spain sympathetically. 
The Italian ministers of the king, Squilaci and Grim- 
aldi, ruthlessly combated the old system ; in the minis- 
tries and higher offices the reformers multiplied ; bigotry 
and sloth in the upper classes became less intense ; 
and in the struggle between complete reform and com- 
plete and irrecoverable reaction, Charles happily chose 
the former. The Jesuits were expelled from Spain, and 
their' order abolished by Clement XIV., in 1773, a 
victory largely due to the shrewd energy of the Spanish 
ambassador, Monifio, afterwards Count Floridablanca. 
Incalculable results followed from this great step ; eccle- 
siastical interference in secular affairs was stemmed ; 
the beggary and licentiousness of the countless brother- 
hoods restrained ; the church monopoly in educational 
matters, its right to submit all literary productions to a 
manifold censorship, the astounding impertinence of 
Roman pretensions to jurisdiction over the Spanish 
church, checked. 

The chief agents in these memorable reforms were 
the Counts Aranda, Floridablanca, and Campomanes. 
They represent the essential elements and tendencies 
which then impelled the peninsula forward. Aranda, a 
grandee of Aragon and a military man of high position, 
was thoroughly conversant with French politics and cul- 
ture, a personal friend of Voltaire, a nucleus for the 
Spanish type of French radicalism, and a passionate 



Political Reformers. 583 

champion of the French alliance. He was the terror 
of the reactionists, the high-priest of reform, the aven- 
ger of the injured majesty of the king, the castigator 
of unbridled license, and the enemy of the Jesuits, 
whom he drove out of Spain in one day. His distin- 
guished birth and military position, too, gave his reforms 
an aspect of bon ton duly appreciated by the proudest 
nation in Europe. Yet his frivolity and irreligious 
taint at length displeased the conservative-tempered 
king and his people, and Aranda was pushed aside for 
Campomanes, an Asturian villager, the exact opposite 
of the grandee of Aragon. 

With a spirit of universal intelligence, a character 
marked by the purest unselfishness and consistency, 
a heart full of love for his people and patriotism 
for his native land, Campomanes was more familiar 
with European culture than even Aranda, while he did 
not overvalue it. Profoundly imbued with the historic 
sense, and with an intimate acquaintance with the past 
career of his country, he knew that every people, how- 
ever richly it may learn from foreign lands, has to fol- 
low the laws of its own peculiar development, condi- 
tioned as they are by manifold circumstances. A friend 
of national and local independence and self govern- 
ment, he appealed to public opinion and enlightened 
patriots. His literary activity was wonderful, and it 
was chiefly directed to eradicating the distorted views 
of life, the beggarly arrogance, the unctuous idleness, 
the contempt for labor and utility prevalent in Spain. 
As author and as president of the council of Castile, 
as president of the academy of history and as financier, 
his attention covered the whole ground of public polity, 



584 . Charles III. 

purifying and reforming. The immoderate possessions 
of the clergy arising from mortmain^ the extension of 
cloister-building, the protection given by the church to 
privileged, immemorial beggary, the harmful preroga- 
tives of the great cattle and sheep companies, the 
guilds, and the havens, the degradation of the univer- 
sities, and the absurd neglect of mathematical, econom- 
ical, and scientific studies, were bitterly opposed by him. 
But his sagacious mind told him that he must not revo- 
lutionize — that he must first gain public opinion to 
his side — that he must tranquillize and illuminate, not 
outrage it. Hence, in its century of most absolute 
absolutism, Spain became covered with patriotic socie- 
ties, which placed at the free disposal of the govern- 
ment, the help of the educated: intelligent insight, 
useful, practical knowledge were disseminated, and the 
country, emerging from the murk and wreck of the 
Habsburgers, began to work its way cheerfully toward 
the light. 

In 1777 Floridablanca, a highly-endowed and widely- 
cultured man, succeeded Campomanes in the cares of 
prime-minister. He differed from both of his remarkable 
predecessors. Though free from bigotry, he was at the 
same time opposed to the radicalism of the French 
School. Though he combated the church with his 
sharpest weapons when he considered its encroachments 
dangerous to the state, he made common cause with it so 
soon as the church submitted to his conceptions of a 
benignant absolutism. The yeasty fermentation of 
Aranda's principles was as repugnant to him as Cam- 
pomanes' subtle but perilous education of the masses in 
self-government, civilization, and learning. He was a 



Progress Retarded. 585 

great policeman and bureaucrat rather than a great 
statesman, — an incarnation of the eighteenth century's 
passion for material interests, development of the powers 
of the state, cabal, commanding below and obeying above, 
autocratic selfishness. Both king and minister had in 
view an unconditional maintenance of the authority of 
the crown ; and both admired strict orthodoxy. 

Such reforms as had been in preparation for two 
generations met great difficulties in the tough and un- 
changing middle class. The heads of departments 
were able men, but detail work, application of principles 
to practice, shattered against the colossal reefs of indo- 
lence, ignorance, and official corruption. The higher 
nobility were hardly to be moved out of their attach- 
ment to empty external pomp ; they could hardly be 
induced to take an interest in educating either them- 
selves or the masses. The thousands of pompous pre- 
bendaries, the tens of thousands of superstitious, 
unemployed, and careless monks, clung to the old 
order of things, which was their very existence. And 
the only immediate result of so much anxious prepara- 
tion seemed to be that Spaniards were less fanatical, 
less proud of imagined excellences, more ready to fol- 
low a new order of things than a hundred years ago. 
The attempts to manufacture the products of the coun- 
try, to start the mines again, to revive business by the 
building of canals and turnpikes, to repress mendicancy 
by the establishment of houses of correction, swallowed 
huge sums without immediate beneficial consequences. 

The magnificent saltpetre works at Madrid, for in- 
stance, lost something like three reals on every pound 
of material. The great spinning establishment erected 



586 Charles III 

by the archbishop of Toledo for the employment of 
the poor, ended in disaster. Hundreds of millions 
were spent on roads which were left unfinished. Num- 
berless speculators spread their mazy nets over the 
land. The census of 1787 showed indeed a consider- 
able decrease in the clergy, and the convents were re- 
duced one-third in number as compared with the seven- 
teenth century; but the ninety-five thousand eight 
hundred and seventy-nine persons who lived in three 
thousand one hundred and eighty-nine convents, were a 
frightful burden to bear. Among the seventy thousand 
secular clergy, there were only twenty-two thousand 
priests. The elementary schools were visited by only 
one-tenth of the youth. Though the population had 
nearly doubled (10,268,150) in one hundred years, yet 
sixteen hundred and eleven once inhabited places now 
lay waste, and out of every thirteen houses, one was, 
even according to Spanish ideas, uninhabitable. The 
thirty years of reform had in 1787 increased the reve- 
nues only to four hundred millions reals, and expenses 
ran beyond income by more than one hundred millions, 
The two foolish wars with England compelled the issue of 
the vales reales, a paper currency bearing interest at four 
per cent., four hundred and fifty millions of which, with 
interest amounting to eighteen millions, circulated down 
to 1783, Instead of providing for the payment of these 
obligations in the succeeding years of peace, they were 
increased to meet the expenses of roads and canals. A 
later calculation showed the national debt bequeathed by 
Charles II I. to be two milliards of reals. Deficit hence- 
forth became a regular part of each administration, 
though trade with America increased wonderfully after 



War of the Succession. 587 

all the Spanish ports — hitherto it had been confined 
to Cadiz — were permitted to compete for it. 

Still, great things had happened in Spain since the 
reactionary revolt of 1766. The state had emancipated 
itself from the church, and was striving to counteract 
the church's injurious influence on the masses. The 
people uninterruptedly pressed forward. The measures 
of the government, the performances of literature, the 
watchfulness of public opinion showed continually a 
welcome growth. The nation had wound its way out 
of the labyrinths of Habsburger politics, and found 
itself abreast of many of its European compeers. 

The death of Charles III. in December 1788, closed 
the period of reform in Spain. The reign of his suc- 
cessor, Charles IV., was a twenty years' preparation for 
revolution. 

So much for the general considerations growing out 
of a survey of these three important reigns. A more 
precise, though brief enumeration of dates and facts 
will be necessary to make our sketch intelligible. 

The War of the Succession between Philip of Anjou, 
the testamentary heir of Charles II., and the Archduke 
Charles, second son of the Emperor Leopold of Ger- 
many, who also claimed the succession, is the first 
great event that meets us at the threshold of Philip 
V.'s reign. In it Charles, assisted by the Portuguese 
and English, more than once drove Philip from his cap- 
ital and seemed on the point of establishing himself 
as king. But Philip was deeply rooted in the affections 
of his adopted people ; they fought nobly for him, and 
the obstinate struggle was only ended by the election of 
the archduke as successor to his brother, Prince 



588 Philip V. 

Eugene's brilliant successes in Italy over the French, at 
the beginning of the war, had much to do with the for- 
mation of the anti-Gallican Grand Alliance in 1701, be- 
tween England, Holland, and Austria, for the purpose 
of preventing the union of the two crowns of France 
and Spain on one head. Louis's great antagonist, 
William III. of England, however, died in 1702, leav- 
ing the country to Anne. Assisted by the counsels of 
Godolphin and Marlborough, the queen became formi- 
dable to Louis; Cadiz was plundered by an English 
armament, and the "plate fleet" from America de- 
stroyed during Philip's absence in the Italian cam- 
paign ; Charles III., as the archduke called himself, 
landed at Lisbon with eight thousand men ; and Philip's 
cause looked gloomy. Marshal Berwick, a natural son 
of James II. by Marlborough's sister, commanded 
Louis's auxiliaries in Spain, and the duke of Vendome 
began to check the victorious career of Prince Eugene 
in Italy. In 1704, Sir George Rooke executed the 
memorable capture of Gibraltar, which has ever since 
remained in the hands of the English. But the great 
battles to which the War of the Succession owes its 
celebrity, were fought in Germany and the Netherlands, 
where Marlborough commanded with sixty thousand 
troops. The battle of Blenheim in 1704 relieved the 
emperor from impending ruin, immortalized Marlbor- 
ough and Prince Eugene, and menaced the French with 
annihilation. The fantastic Peterborough, with his 
bold, able, and skilful tactics in Spain, greatly aided the 
cause of the archduke. Barcelona fell by a daring 
stratagem of Lord Peterborough's, and almost the 
whole of Murcia, Valencia, and eastern Spain acknowl- 



Peace of Utrecht. 591 

edged Charles. Barcelona was again besieged by 
Philip, reduced to the last extremity, but relieved at 
the critical moment by an English fleet. Saragossa 
and Madrid fell under Peterborough's eccentric and 
clashing manoeuvres ; the splendid and decisive battle 
of Ramilies in the Netherlands, in 1706, crowned Marl- 
borough's arms with glory. 

In the panoramic shiftings of the war, Philip soon re- 
turned to Madrid, Charles was soon driven into Cata- 
lonia; Louis positively rejected all demands of the 
Grand Alliance that he should compel his grandson to 
abdicate, declaring that if he must make war, it should 
not be against his own children ; though the sanguinary 
battle of Malplaquet, in 1709, won by Marlborough and 
Prince Eugene over marshal Villars and the French, 
caused him to repent. The Czar Peter of Russia, and 
Charles XII. of Sweden, were meanwhile in the north, 
waging their terrible wars, and threatening to involve one 
or another of the German states in their disputes. In 
the south, Philip had again (17 10) fled from Madrid. 
But the death of the emperor, Joseph I., left his throne 
vacant to his brother Charles ; and as the Grand Al- 
liance had never contemplated the union of all the 
hereditary dominions of the house of Austria, Spanish 
and German, under one crown, the peaceful solution 
of the question was now accomplished. By the peace 
of Utrecht, in 1713, Philip was acknowledged king of 
Spain and the Indies : Naples, Milan, Sardinia, and 
the Netherlands were assigned to the emperor ; Sicily 
fell to the Duke of Savoy ; England retained her con- 
quests of Gibraltar, Minorca, Newfoundland, and Hud- 



592 Philip V. 

son's Bay ; and the emperor was obliged to recall his 
troops from Catalonia. 

Scrofula carried off the king's first wife, Maria Louisa, 
in 17 14. Philip abandoned himself to squalor and de- 
spair, and could only be roused by the Princess Orsini, 
the favorite of his wife, who proposed another match 
(Isabella Farnese). A woman of unrivalled conversa- 
tional powers, tact, and eloquence, Orsini had exercised 
undisturbed ascendency over the queen, and as Louis's 
tool influenced Spanish politics at all points. Her 
savage treatment by the new queen, and expulsion to 
France in the depths of winter, is one of the common- 
places of Spanish history. Louis's death in 17 15 brought 
Isabella's truly Italian genius for intrigue into luxuri- 
ant play. In 1724, Philip abdicated in favor of his son 
Luis, — it is supposed with the hope of acquiring the 
sovereignty of France on the expected death of Louis 
XV. The French king, however, recovered , Don Luis 
was carried off by the small-pox after a reign of eight 
months ; and Philip, who had taken a solemn and irrev- 
ocable vow never to resume the crown, found it conve- 
nient to forget. His morbid melancholy so increased 
between 1730 and 1734, that he would lie in bed for 
months, and, like Juan a, refuse to attend to any sort of 
business. In the Italian campaign of 1733-5 Naples and 
Sicily were reconquered by the young duke of Parma, 
Philip's eldest son. Spain concurred in the Pragmatic 
Sanction of 1738-9, by which the Archduchess Maria 
Theresa was guaranteed the right of succession to the 
Austrian dominions of her father, Charles VI. War 
with England broke out in 1739, owing to commercial 
disputes growing out of the treaty of Utrecht. The 



Death of Philip V. 



593 



death of Charles VI. in 1740 was the signal for a gen- 
eral explosion around the heroic figure of Maria The- 
resa, who, empress-queen in consequence of her hus- 
band's election as emperor in 1746, worsted both France 
and Spain in their efforts to support the Bourbon claim 
to the imperial throne. 




Marta Louisa. 



A sudden fit of apoplexy carried off Philip in 1746. 
before he could obtain help either from medicine or 
confessor. Though Alberoni and Ripperda — the latter 
one of the most extraordinary adventurers of which 
history gives any account — were not specially able or 



594 Ferdinand FT. 

honest ministers, they improved the country, rehabili- 
tated to some extent the army and navy, and assisted 
Philip in his undeniable desire to govern well. 

The king spent enormous sums in building a Spanish 
Versailles in the clouds — San Ildefonso, or La Granja, 
whose magnificent fountains and gardens still hang, four 
thousand feet above the sea, on the acclivities of the 
Guadarramas. It is a fairy palace about which sparkle 
the purest mountain waters : great avenues of pine ; 
silver and purple peaks ; an immeasurable plain out- 
spread in front ; an ancient chateau filled with the 
quaint tapestries, clocks, and furniture of the time of 
Louis XV. ; long garden-vistas, down which gleam bril- 
liant masses of sculptured marble in frolicking water ; — 
such are San Ildefonso and its surroundings. 

At thirty-eight, when he succeeded to the throne, 
Ferdinand VI. did not give promise of so long and 
stirring a reign as his father. Nor, in fact, did his 
irresolute, indolent, amiable life last beyond thirteen 
years after his accession. He was fortunate in possess- 
ing an excellent wife — Barbara of Portugal —whose 
sense compensated for her homeliness. The treaty of 
Aix-la-Chapelle, in 1748, closed the war in which Maria 
Theresa, France, England, and Spain had been so long 
engaged. Henceforth Ferdinand lived in peace, de- 
voted his attention to improving the agriculture, trade, 
and manufactures of Spain, opposing an enlightened op- 
position — though Bourbon to the bone — to the Inqui- 
sition, and building up the resources of his exhausted 
country. He was tolerably fortunate, too, in the selec- 
tion of his ministers. The Marquis de la Ensenada, a 
peasant, banking-clerk, and financier, rose to be minister 



The Lisbon Earthquake. 595 

of marine, war, and finance. Attached to France, he was 
a friend of the avaricious queen, and by her influence 
and that of the celebrated singer, Farinelli, was retained 
in office. It was to the enchantment of Farinelli's 
music that Philip had owed his recovery from an almost 
hopeless attack of hypochondria. The singer's exqui- 
site voice had charmed the king out of his filthy couch, 
where he had lain for months neglected and half raving 
with gloom. Ferdinand and his "queen were both 
music-worshippers ; they retained Farinelli, and his 
influence was unbounded, though " I am a musician, 
not a politician," said he, when one tried to bribe him. 

Don Jose de Carvajal, Ferdinand's other minister, 
was a man of solid judgment and sound sense, pure, 
just, and incorruptible. His opposition to French in- 
fluence counterbalanced Ensenada's inclination in that 
direction. 

The revolt and reduction of the seven Jesuit settle- 
ments in Paraguay, in 1750, attracted attention to the 
power of that immense Catholic organization in the 
New World. These settlements had been founded with 
great toil, expense, and judgment by Jesuit missionaries 
sent out to convert the Indians, bring them under civil- 
ized, institutions, and teach them the elements of knowl- 
edge. The proposed cession of the settlements to 
Portugal in exchange for Nova Colonia - — a remote 
colony — caused the revolt. 

The horrible earthquake of Lisbon, in 1755, preceded 
Ferdinand's death by four years, and caused the whole 
population of the city to live in tents or huts throughout 
the winter. The disgrace of Ensenada ensued on the 
discovery that he had sent out secret orders to the West 



596 Charles III. 

Indies to attack the English logwood settlements on 
the Musquito coast. Spain kept aloof from the general 
European war of 1756, in which England and Prussia 
ranged themselves against the empire, France, Russia, 
Sweden, and Poland. William Pitt, afterwards Lord 
Chatham, rose to eminence at this period, and courted 
the alliance of Spain so earnestly that he even offered 
Ferdinand Gibraltar if he would deviate from his neu- 
trality and join England. 

The death of Queen Barbara in 1758 threw the king 
into agonies of grief, from which he never recovered. 
His death in 1759, childless, opened the way for his 
brother, Don Carlos (Charles III.), king of the Two 
Sicilies. Perhaps Charles did not find this loss so 
irreparable when he discovered that his brother's econ- 
omy had left fifteen millions of dollars in the treasury. 
The abolition of papal patronage had also relieved his 
subjects from an unendurable evil. In 1759 the Jesuits, 
who were supposed to have been implicated in the plot 
to murder King Jose of Portugal, were proscribed and 
banished by the weakest and most bigoted court in 
Europe. 

Charles III.'s long reign was crowded with important 
events. His eldest son was an epileptic idiot who could 
not succeed to the Italian dominions, which were there- 
fore settled upon his third son, Ferdinand, proclaimed 
king of the Sicilies. Charles banished Farinelli, in- 
stalled his Neapolitan favorite, Marquis Squilaci, made 
provision for the payment of the national debt, which 
had been neglected by the economical Ferdinand, and 
after the death of his gentle queen, Amelia of Saxony, 
in 1760, plunged into the first of his disastrous wars 




THE LEANING TOWER OF SARAUOSSA. 



The Bourbon Compact. 599 

against England. England under Pitt had nearly oblit- 
erated the Spanish navy and conquered the colonies of 
her enemy in nearly every part of the globe. Charles, 
urged by the Duke de Choiseul, joined France in the 
Bourbon alliance called the Family Compact, by which 
the different sovereigns of the Bourbon blood bound 
themselves to support one another against all the world 
War was formally declared, after long negotiations be- 
tween the courts of Madrid and St. James, in 1762. 
Havana, with a booty of three millions sterling, fell 
into the hands of the British ; Trinidad, in the West 
Indies, and Manilla, capital of the Philippines, followed; 
and the famous Acapulco galleon, with its cargo worth 
three million dollars, became the spoil of the Union 
Jack. 

In 1763 a treaty of peace was signed between Eng- 
land, France, and Spain, in which France ceded to 
England Canada, the adjacent islands, " Louisiana " 
lying east of the Mississippi, Dominica, St. Vincent, 
Tobago, Senegal, and many parts of the Coromandel 
coast. Spain bought back Havana, Trinidad, and Ma- 
nilla by the cession to England of the Floridas and the 
right granted to the English to cut logwood in the Bay 
of Honduras. Spain recovered the rest of " Louis- 
iana " lying west of the Mississippi. 

General Wall, a foreigner, who had been one of Fer- 
dinand's trusted ministers, was now succeeded by Mar- 
quis Grimaldi, a Genoese, whose lively conversation, 
comely person, and real abilities had brought him to 
the notice of Charles. Wall, however, soon wearying 
of the cares of political life, is said to have rubbed his 
eyes with ointment so as to give them the aspect of 



600 Charles JUL 

inflammation, and feigned inability to carry on the gov- 
ernment any longer. Grimaldi tightened the links be- 
tween France and Spain and the other royal families of 
Europe, by forging new and more complicated matri- 
monial chains. The favorite Squilaci's career ended 
with the famous Sombrero-and-Manta revolution of 
1766. 

He had tried to quell the incessant assassinations 
occurring in the capital, by bringing about the abolition 
of the huge sombreros and voluminous manias which the 
dangerous classes affected, and by means of which they 
could either effectually disguise themselves or carry 
concealed weapons with impunity. A storm of indig- 
nation ensued, intensified by his efforts to clean the 
disgusting filth of the capital, regulate the price of 
food, and light the city. Both king and favorite fled 
the town; the intended abolition was not carried out; 
and the mob triumphed. The Count de Aranda suc- 
ceeded Grimaldi. From the zealous protector of the 
Jesuits, Charles became their implacable enemy, after 
his mind had been artfully poisoned by insinuations 
that they were the prime agents in the Madrid insurrec- 
tion. They were cruelly expelled at midnight, in March 
1767, and departed in thousands to Italy and Corsica. 
Charles's course was followed by the duke of Parma 
and the king of the Sicilies. To the universal prayer 
that they might be permitted to return, Charles was 
inflexible, and the Order of Jesus was formally sup- 
pressed by Clement XIV., in 1773. 

Aranda introduced many reforms in army and navy, 
and adopted the system of tactics invented by Frederic 
the Great. His efforts to liberalize Spanish ideas were 



War with England. 601 

unremitting: he limited the monstrous privileges of 
sanctuary, by which almost any criminal could flee for 
safety to almost any one of the innumerable churches 
in the kingdom ; he opposed an audacious front to the 
Inquisition; he rooted out haunts of robbers and ban- 
ditti, and established a colony of intelligent Germans, 
Swiss, and Italians in the Sierra Morena. His revolu- 
tionary tendencies, however, were so marked that they 
caused his removal, and many of his best reforms were 
brought to naught. 

Louis XVI., husband of the fascinating Marie An- 
toinette, had now succeeded to the throne of France. 
In Spain, Don Jose Monino, afterwards created count 
Floridablanca (1775), had become prime minister. The 
never-ending disputes with Portugal over the Brazil- 
ian colonies were accommodated by the cesssion of 
Xova Colonia to Spain, and the securing of an offen- 
sive and defensive alliance between the hitherto bitter 
enemies. The outbreak of the American War of Inde- 
pendence had its reverberations all over the globe. 
France joined the United States (1778); Spain kept 
aloof for a while, but in 1779 frivolously declared war 
against Fngland. A rebellion in the wealthy trans- 
atlantic provinces of Spain, which had been so tranquil 
under Philip V. and Ferdinand VI., however, kept the 
government inactive. An alarming insurrection, pro- 
voked by the exactions of the corregidores, and headed 
by the so-called Inca, Tupac-Amaru, broke out in Peru, 
but was crushed in 178 1-2. The Spaniards took the 
Bahama Islands in 1782; but Gibraltar, which had now 
been blockaded three years, proved impregnable. The 
capture of this mighty rock was Charles's passionate 



602 Charles III. 

wish. "Is Gibraltar taken ? " was his first question 
every morning. The American war was drawing to a 
close (1782). Spain, realizing that her navy had been 
nearly annihilated and that twenty millions sterling had 
been added to her debt, signed the preliminaries of 
peace in 1783. In June, 1786, ended the millennium 
of war in which she had been engaged with the Ma- 
hometans, by which a peace was brought about between 
Algiers and the peninsula, piratical incursions from 
Barbary put an end to, and thousands of Spaniards, 
who had been pining in hopeless slavery, liberated. 

Internal regulations and foreign negotiations ; efforts 
to recover Gibraltar ; to meddle in German politics at 
the death of Frederic the Great, in 1786; disapproba- 
tion of the projected quadruple alliance of .Russia. 
Austria, France, and Spain; relaxation of the irksome 
intimacy between the two Bourbon courts ; and nervous 
horror of French republicanism, now frightfully on the 
increase by the success of America ; the financial em- 
barrassments of the French government, and the as- 
sembling of the long-discontinued states-general, filled 
up the remaining years of Charles's life. Spain, how- 
ever, had gradually become saturated with French ideas 
and French philosophy. Literature, the new school of 
statesmanship, the relaxation of the censorship of the 
press, the starving of the Inquisition, hitherto so abun- 
dantly fed with Jews and Protestants, all showed prog- 
ress. Roads and canals, employment of cultivated 
aliens in the ministries, the establishment of a public 
bank, the introduction of an effective police, the util- 
ization of the clergy in providing for the poor, — such 



Death of Charles HI. 603 

wer.e some of the enduring monuments of Florida- 
blanca's beneficent rule. 

Charles died in 1788, seventy-three years of age, 
within a month of his favorite son, Don Gabriel, who 
fell a victim to the prejudice against inoculation. 



CHAPTER XXV. 

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. — REIGNS OF CHARLES 
IV. AND FERDINAND VII. 

THE twenty years between the death of Charles 
III. and the abdication of his ignoble son, in 1808, 
form one of the most dismal episodes of Spanish his- 
tory. The brilliant eminence to which Spain had gradu- 
ally attained under Campomanes, Aranda, and Florida- 
blanca suffered disastrous eclipse ; the slowly-healing 
wounds of a nation rent by uncontrolled passions, by a 
long course of wretched despotism, by moral evils 
without name or number, were torn open again ; favor- 
itism reigned supreme ; an imbecile sat on the throne ; 
and a weak, passionate, and criminal Italian queen 
scandalized Europe by the open profligacy of her 
morals. 

Charles IV. was already forty years of age at his 
accession (1788), and physically was a singularly hand- 
some and stately specimen of kingship. His good- 
nature and absolute ignorance permitted the reins of 
government to glide imperceptibly into the hands of 
Maria Louisa, princess of Parma, his wife, — a clever, 
inventive, ambitious, and voluptuous Machiavelli in 
petticoats, who made of the palace a den of vice, and 
ruled the country with a rod of iron. Floridablanca 

604 




IN THE CHURCH OF OUR LADY DEL PILAR, SARAGOSSA. 



Decency Lost. B07 

and his companions .soon retreated into the back- 
ground; in 1790 the great minister found himself com- 
pelled to give up the portfolio of justice ; Count 
Cabarrus, a zealous and successful promoter of re- 
forms, was arrested: and Don Caspar Melchor de 
Jovellanos, the noblest patriot, profoundest thinker, 
and most eminent writer that Spain had produced in 
the eighteenth century was removed from his influen- 
tial position at Madrid and banished to the Asturias. 
Campomanes fell in 1791, and was succeeded by a 
feeble creature of the court. 

Thus the influence of the queen had extinguished 
every spark of decency and respectability that still 
illumined this tempestuous court.' The government 
became the sport of chaotic caprice. Decrees promul- 
gated to-day were revoked to-morrow. Lawlessness, 
arbitrary power, intrigue reigned in the palace and 
throughout the kingdom. The mighty murmurs of the 
revolution over the Pyrenees were unheeded, or mis- 
understood, with idiotic obtuseness or complacency. 
Spain and her vast colonial empire lay exposed to the 
ravages of France and England. The monstrous mis- 
government so transformed the land, that in a few 
years the prosperous Spain of Ferdinand VI. and 
Charles III. was hard to recognize. Thousands of 
greedy fingers hunted ii the treasury. Whole towns 
and provinces — as in Galicia in 1790 — were in rebel- 
lion for months, without anv one being able to bring 
them to order. Even Floridablanca had his head 
turned by the "French madness." — the horror of in- 
novation, hatred of foreigners, and revolution. — and 
became a dark reactionist and progress-hater. The 



608 Reign of Charles IV. 

foreign policy of Spain was a mass of ridiculous errors 
and inconsistencies. Recalled to power in 1792, it 
seemed as if Floridablanca, deep as his dread of 
French radicalism had made him sink in the slums of 
reaction, would reorganize and restore the country, and 
govern with the power and intelligence he had shown 
under Charles III. But he was removed the same 
year, a victim of the furious accusations of the queen. 
His rival, Aranda, the representative of the Aragonese 
party of progress, peace, and French ideas, took his 
place, and was intended by the queen to pave the way 
for her frivolous favorite, Manuel Godoy, — a young 
officer whom she adored, made a "grandee of the first 
class," and, to the scandal of the aristocracy, visited in 
his own palace. "The grandees grumbled, and — crept 
to the feet of the favorite." Aranda was graciously 
dismissed at the end of the year, and Godoy, now duke 
of Alcudia, took the control of the ministry as secre- 
tary of state for foreign affairs. 

It was fortunate for the French revolution that, at 
the period when it broke out, a set of kings sat on the 
various thrones of Europe about as effective as a 
chorus of Aristophanic frogs. In this the revolution 
found its justification. Frederic the Great had been 
followed by Frederic William IT. ; Leopold II. by Kaiser 
Franz; Charles III. of Spain by Charles IV.; and 
■George III. of England was to be revealed to the 
world by the glowing pen of Miss Burney. How dif- 
ferently might the course of the revolution have fash- 
ioned itself, had it found opponents of the greatness of 
Frederic II., the wisdom of Leopold, and the quiet 
dignity of Charles III ! In Spain, rooted as she was 



Confusion and Despotism. 609 

in century-old adoration of her reforming Bourbon 
kings, four years — 1788-17 92 — sufficed to extinguish 
the last recollection of the beneficent works of three 
generations ; and with the shadow of Aranda whole- 
some progress, the enlightenment of the people, the 
revival of agriculture and industry, the purification of 
legislation, the protection of lawful freedom, the con- 
trol of officials, and the establishment of the authority 
of the government, passed away, and left behind only 
confusion, despotic power, unmitigated license, a throng 
of hateful lickspittles, and the depraved spectacle of 
an obscene queen and her lover. So low did Spain 
sink, that the revolutionary convention paid no atten- 
tion to her pressing desire for the mitigation of the fate 
of Louis XVI. 

The murder of the most Christian king by a godless 
mob produced an extraordinary sensation in Spain, and 
the land rang with cries of vengeance, from Cadiz to Bar- 
celona. The queen gave way to tears ; the king swore ; 
Godoy spoke like a hero ; Catalonia, Andalusia, Valen- 
cia, Galicia stormed the throne with their impassioned 
petitions for war against the regicides, — and nothing 
was done. Spain, with intense loyalty and love of the 
dynasty, rose as one man, with an enthusiasm really 
sublime, — grandees, beggars, clergy, bankers, corpora- 
tions, — and demanded vengeance on the Bourbon 
massacrers. What an incomparable opportunity for' 
the young duke and the queen to atone for the past, 
satisfy the great claims of the present, secure a worthy 
future for themselves and the faithful nation who, with 
such touching and unreserved confidence, thronged 
round the throne and supplicated their even still be- 



610 Reign of Charles IV. 

loved rulers to lead them against the hosts of French 
terrorism ! 

But nothing was done either towards a restoration of 
the Bourbon dynasty in France or an extension of the 
Spanish possessions. Held in check by the united 
powers of Austria, England, Prussia, and Spain, in 
1793, the revolutionary armies remained for a while 
stationary; and Godoy let the priceless opportunity 
slip, at the cost of eight hundred and sixty millions of 
reals in the first six months of the war, while exposing 
the boasted Spanish prowess to the ridicule of Europe. 
The foaming excitement of the people died away, and 
was succeeded by a deep depression at the prospect of 
an endless war which would complete the financial ruin 
of the land. The French inundated Guipuzcoa and 
Navarre ; several all-important frontier fortresses capit- 
ulated; the valleys of Upper Catalonia were thick with 
enemies. Incompetent generals, ruined finances, a 
worthless soldiery, plunged the loyal and credulous 
nation into despair. A conspiracy was discovered in 
June, 1794, whose object was the downfall of the cor- 
rupt Godoy, to whose criminal ambition, incapacity, 
and baleful influence on the queen the humiliation 
and demoralization of Spain were attributed. The 
royal residence soon swarmed with symptoms of revolu- 
tionary smypathies, due to the eloquence of the royal 
immorality, the French pamphlets and proclamations, 
and to the hopeless bewilderment caused by rumors of 
a hostile march on Madrid. The flight of the king's 
family from Madrid to Seville was spoken of in 1794. 
Between 1795 and 1802 Spain became virtually a vassal 
of her powerful neighbor. The queen, at first an enthu- 




MARKET AT VITORTA. 



Godoy Overthrown. 613 

siastic adherent of the war-party, was in a few months 
transformed, by the defeat of the Spanish arms, into as 
enthusiastic an adherent of peace. Godoy resolved to 
seek relations with the republic ; too late, however, to 
avoid exposing to France and England the disintegra- 
tion going on in the provinces, and the powerlessness 
of the omnipotent favorite. One shameful overthrow 
after another annihilated Godoy's forces in Catalonia, 
while he buried himself in a whirl of giddy dissipations 
and extravagance. The conclusion of peace at Basel 
in July, 1795, — signed by Godoy a year after, — ac- 
companied by favorable conditions (evacuation of the. 
territory by the French, intimate alliance with the 
republic, and the cession to France of the Spanish side 
of San Domingo), gave universal content. Godoy bore 
off triumphantly the title of " Prince of Peace," sup- 
ported by gifts of the richest state domains ; while 
Aranda. Floridablanca. Cabarrus, and Jovellanos, who 
had been languishing in exile or prison, were recalled 
or released. 

The peace of Basel, so far as Spain was concerned, 
was a bit of sublime farce. What it really established 
was not the glory, but the absolute dependence of the 
peninsula on the republic. In this it was happily aided 
by the inimitable frivolity of the Prince of Peace; and 
its consequences were the gradual annihilation of the 
naval power of the country, the undermining of its im- 
mense colonial network, and the complete wreck of the 
finances. What compatibility could there be between 
their Catholic majesties — the most absolute type of 
Bourbons — and the revolutionary French republic, at 
the very moment red with the gore of the Bourbons 



614 Charles IV. 

themselves ? The treaty of San Ildefonso, as the 
Spaniards call it, was both a literal repetition of the 
Family Compact of 1761, and in many not unessential 
points — being both offensive and defensive — went 
beyond that celebrated defensive alliance. 

The battle of Cape St. Vincent, in February, 1797, 
between the English and Spanish fleets off the south 
point of Portugal, resulted, in spite of the immense 
superiority of the Spaniards in ships and artillery, in 
the defeat of their fleet, and contributed more than any- 
thing else to the ruin of the Spanish marine. The 
English swept the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Carib- 
bean. The colonies, which had thriven so wonderfully 
under the tranquil despotism of the corregidores and 
Jesuits began to ignite from the revolutionary sparks 
thrown off by the mighty volcano in France. English 
intrigue sealed the doom of the colonies, and sowed 
seed of discord and discontent, soon to bear abundant 
fruit. The vicious and despotic administration of 
Godoy crowned the anarchy of the Indies and Sierras. 
Between 1793 and 1796, the total income was twenty- 
four hundred and forty-five millions of reals ; the total 
expenses, thirty-seven hundred and fourteen millions, 
leaving a debt of over twelve hundred millions. Paper 
money to the amount of nineteen hundred and eighty 
millions was already in circulation. The deficit in one 
year amounted to eight hundred millions of reals. 

A galling satire which rang like a clarion through 
the country after the battles of San Vincent and Trin- 
idad, depicts the matchless confusion of the times. It 
stated that Spain had generals enough to command the 
armies of the world, innumerable regiments and ships, 



A Satiric Picture. 615 

but no soldiers or sailors. There were more churches 
than houses, more priests than burghers, more altars 
than kitchens in the capital. Even in the filthiest 
nooks and darkest holes of vice, saints, waxen figures, 
censers and lamps abounded. At every step one ran 
against a pious fraternity, a procession, or a gang of 
penitents telling their beads. The wealth of decrees 
and declarations was inexhaustible, but justice was no- 
where to be found. Laws flew out of the Castilian man- 
ufactory before you could say amen. The affirmation 
of an ancient statute cost a lawsuit of a century. The 
judges hung twenty citizens in one day, and disputed 
twenty years before they would take a mule from a 
wagon. Every spot had its municipal code, its local 
taxes, its own statutes. It was bliss indeed, to arrive 
saturated and chilled, at a Spanish inn, and then be 
obliged to seek one's meal among the grotesque multi- 
tude of shopkeepers alone authorized to sell, the one 
wine, the second oil, a third meat, a fourth salt. A skin 
of must or a bushel of oats could not be obtained 
without laborious search for the individuals alone privi- 
leged by the municipality to deal in these things. Mis- 
chievous superstition, incurable vice, universal laziness, 
monumental pride — such are the chords which thrill 
harshly through the work of the clever and pitiless 
author, whose intimacy with all the details of public and 
private life was undoubted. The ungovernable passion 
of his countrymen for bull-fighting is stigmatized. If 
Rome was content with bread and amphitheatres, Mad- 
rid was content with bread and bulls. The mean Eng- 
lishman, the unbelieving Gaul, spoil day and night with 
their dangerous political controversies ; the precious 



616 Charles IV. 

Spaniard lives in sweet ease, and — delightful fasting. 
They quarrel a month until they get a law passed; we 
have thousands of laws ready in a trice without the 
trace of a contradiction. Their gums are too fastidious 
for cream ; we swallow thistles with rapture. They 
sting like bees when they are being robbed of their 
honey ; we are sheared and slaughtered as patiently as 
sheep. They, insatiable of riches and happiness, live 
like slaves of trade and industry; we are content and 
proud in poverty and beggary. They deify freedom 
and consider a single link of the slave-chain an intoler- 
able burden ; we carry a whole chain in ignorance of 
what freedom is. Heroes with them are rare ; heroes 
with us shoot up like leeks and onions. 

Such is the essence of this famous but faithful dia- 
tribe attributed to the historian Vargas Ponce, and giv- 
ing an all too conscientious revelation of this cancer- 
eaten society. 

The liberal tendencies which began to be shown by 
the government culminated, in 1797, in the temporary 
banishment of the inquisitor-general and the arch- 
bishops of Toledo and Seville, on the discovery of a 
plot to overthrow the favorite, and transfer him to the 
dungeons of the clerical party. Jovellanos was re- 
called to the department of justice in 1797. The 
plundering of Rome in 1798 by the French, and the 
proclamation of a republic instead of the papal tyr- 
anny, plunged the country into profound apprehension, 
and rendered Godoy, who had now espoused a daughter 
of the Infante Don Luis, more abject a dependent of 
the all-overshadowing republic than ever. 

To crown the scandal, the republic demanded his dis- 



G-odoy and Napoleon. 619 

missal as prime-minister in the same year. The humors 
of the queen, flickering hither and thither like a wind- 
blown light, systematically bewildered and humiliated 
the government in its whole attitude towards France. 
One minister succeeded another as in the beginning of 
the reign ; the cabinet became a miserable compound 
of irreconcilable elements. The infamous avarice, 
illiberaliiy, and fanaticism of Don Jose' Caballero in 
the ministry of justice, were found side by side with the 
passionate, anti-clerical radicalism of Urquijo in the 
foreign office and finances. 

The relative independence of the Madrid cabinet at 
this period was ended by the successful return of Bo- 
naparte from Egypt, the ruin of the Director}-, and the 
elevation of the first consul. Godoy was formally re- 
stored to power as a tool of Napoleon, and a treaty 
between the two countries was signed in 1801, by which 
Napoleon's fervent desire to grapple with England by 
means of the Spanish fleet was gratified. In January, 
the same year, Lucien Bonaparte and the Spanish suc- 
cessor of Urquijo, Cevallos, signed a treaty whose 
basis was a common operation against Portugal. But 
the Spanish court obstinately refused to take part in 
the invasion and spoliation of its neighbor, more par- 
ticularly as the queen's favorite daughter, Dona Carlota, 
was the wife of Don Joa, Prince-Regent of Portugal ; 
and the queen, refusing to aggrandize Spanish Amer- 
ica at the expense of Portugal and its possessions, was 
indefatigable in working for peace. This attitude was 
maintained until Bonaparte assumed the supremacy. 
War then broke out ; Portugal was overwhelmed by 
fifteen thousand French, and sixty thousand Spanish 



620 Charles IV. 

soldiers with Godoy as generalissimo, and the little 
kingdom was partially dismembered. After this " war 
of oranges " Godoy, swelling with heroic pride, exulted 
in being compared with Frederic the Great. 

After ten frightful years of war, Europe by the peace 
negotiations of Amiens in 1802, enjoyed a brief spell 
of tranquillity. Spain was fortunate enough to enjoy 
nearly three years of neutrality, though nothing was 
essentially advanced by it. The land, both in peace 
and war, was the slave of Napoleon, and Talleyrand. 
The sums which the military operations had not swal- 
lowed up were squandered by the extravagance of the 
court or by the uncurbed greed of the minions with 
whom Godoy peopled every branch of the administra- 
tion. The six years between 1802 and 1808 were years 
of infamy, of profound criminality on the part of the 
Prince of Peace, perpetually coquetting with Napoleon 
and dreaming of an independent sovereignty in Portu- 
gal, and of shameless squabbles in the royal family. 
The mere mention of an honest meeting of expenses 
created a paroxysm of disgust, terror, and indignation 
in the palace. Three years before (1799), the paper 
money had fallen forty per cent, in value, and the 
appalling news circulated that a new emission, to the 
amount of ten hundred and sixty million reals, was to be 
made in April of the same year. Of the eighteen hun- 
dred and twenty-three millions expended in 1799, the 
palace swallowed one hundred and live millions, justice 
seven (!), war nine hundred thirty-five, finance four 
hundred and twenty-eight, foreign affairs forty-six, the 
navy three hundred. In October, 1802, on the occasion 
of the marriage of the prince of the Asturias, fifty-seven 



Louisiana Sold. 621 

field marshals, twenty-six lieutenants general, and hun- 
dreds of colonels were named. The navy, which 
counted only fifteen seaworthy ships of the line and 
frigates, swarmed with honorary officials on enormous 
salaries. Godoy's annual revenues ran up to one mil- 
lion reals — more than all the judges of the kingdom. 
The pestilence, failure of harvests, famine, and earth- 
quake, added to the gloomy horrors of this epoch of 
distraction (1800). 

The immorality of the governing authorities gave an 
infinity of details to the general misery. The peace 
with England, after the treaty of Amiens, left behind 
its remembrance, in a debt of four thousand millions. 
By the treaty of 1800, Spain had ceded Louisiana to 
France, on condition that France would agree not to 
cede it thereafter to any other power than Spain. Bon- 
aparte, however, falling into financial straits, impudently 
sold it to the United States for eighty million francs, 
without even informing Spain. The miserable dallying 
of Godoy with France and England, now again at war, 
resulted in a threat on Bonaparte's side, of planting- 
eighty thousand Frenchmen in the heart of Spain. 
Hence the ignominious treaty of 1803 with France 
which rendered war with England unavoidable, cast a 
mountain of responsibility on the peninsula, yoked the 
Spanish exchequer to a dismal monthly contribution of 
six million francs, and exceeded infinitely the stipula- 
tions of 1796. 

The year 1805 buried the relics of the once glorious 
Spanish fleet in the seas of Cape Finisterre (July 22), 
and Trafalgar (October 20). The emperor simply sent 
his orders to Madrid and the Spanish ports. Disobe- 



622 Charles IV. 

dience was a crime. The art of paying salaries had 
for thirty-three months been forgotten in Spain. And 
yet, this noble people still glanced with idolatrous de- 
votion up at the illumined and divinely-appointed being 
whom it recognized as its king. The word " majesty " 
still thrilled through the Spaniard with the holiest shud- 
der of his loyal heart. Add to this, " Catholic," the 
miraculous touch of the healing and universal church, 
and the foundations of Spanish patriotism were even 
yet intact in the reverence of the masses. 

French diplomacy began in 1801 to enhance and 
utilize the natural indignation of the young prince of 
the Asturias against the favoritism of the palace. Fer- 
dinand's dark and resolute character had already, in 
1791, created the fear that the heir of the Indies might 
eventually turn out another Philip II. His mother 
hated, Godoy dreaded, him ; and the audacious thought 
had even entered Godoy's mind to push aside the 
hereditary prince, and, in the eventuality of Charles's 
death, get himself and the queen appointed regents of 
the realm. The queen-mother was even accused of twice 
frustrating the hopes of her pregnant daughter-in-law, 
and in 1806, of poisoning her. The same year found 
Europe covered with vassal kings of Napoleon ; Italy, 
Germany, Holland, were presented to his brothers or 
his brothers-in-law, or his allies. Spain and Portugal 
remained ; and when Godoy found that Prince Ferdi- 
nand's character put an impassable obstacle in the way 
of his ambition in Spain, he turned his attention to 
Portugal, actually feeling the crown on his head when 
the French troops received orders to inarch on Portugal 



Treaty of Fontainebleau. 623 

— a crown of thorns to be obtained from the hands of 
the great emperor who hated and despised him. 

The capture of Buenos Ayres by the English — a city 
which dominated the South American domains as far as 
the Cordilleras — threatened to revolutionize America. 
Godoy, infinitely tickled by being called Mon Cousin 
by Napoleon, felt himself ready to do anything for the 
almighty Olympian who now thundered his commands 
from distant Warsaw. Junot's columns crossed the 
Spanish frontier in 1806, and the treaty of Fontaine- 
bleau, signed by Duroc on the part of the French, and 
by Izquierdo on the part of Spain, completed the con- 
spiracy against Portugal. This treaty dismembered that 
kingdom and made three states of it, one of which was 
to be Godoy's. 

The factions of the Escorial broke out anew in dis- 
graceful scenes. Ferdinand, now a widower, reduced 
to despair, sought help of Napoleon, and begged the 
honor of allying himself with an imperial princess. 
For years, it was said, no post of importance had been 
given at the palace, unless the wife or the daughter or 
the sister of the applicant, was handed over to the 
prime-minister. Ferdinand knew this; and yet his 
helplessness made his position still more difficult. He 
was suddenly arrested, deprived of his sword, and shut 
up in his room under a charge of treason ; but his con- 
fession and profound penitence secured his pardon. 

In November, Junot overran much of Portugal and 
the royal family fled to Brazil. Dupont and Moncey 
followed him, the first with twenty-four thousand, the 
second with twenty-five thousand Frenchmen ; who 



624 



Charles IV. 



entered Spain without giving the least notice to the 
authorities. 

Ferdinand's popularity, meanwhile, had risen in 1807 
in the same proportion as the hatred of the populace 
against the queen and Godoy. The reorganization of 
the universities by the Prince of Peace, in 1807, had 
undeniable merits ; but with these admirable reforms, 
he infuriated the clergy and the hidalgos by proposing 




Godoy. 

to utilize some of the enormous possessions of both ; and 
it was said that, while the people were starving, he had 
stolen five or six hundred millions of reals out of the 
treasury and the pockets of his subordinates. Monks and 
preachers painted his godlessness in the foulest colors, 
and circulated the most hideous narratives concerning 
their majesties : the queen, who in the palace had a 



Napoleon s Popularity. 627 

seraglio arranged like the Turks' and Moors', wanted 
to marry Godoy and poison the king; the king was in 
love with Pepita Tudo, Godoy's "double wife;" and 
Godoy compensated himself by Pepita's younger sister. 
The wondrous popularity of Napoleon had even pen- 
etrated the Pyrenees, and was identifying itself in Spain 
with the cause of Ferdinand and liberation. Consider- 
ing the European relations since 1805, it seemed an 
almost inexplicable anomaly that Spain should have 
been treated by Napoleon with such indulgence. Italy, 
Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Prussia, Russia 
had felt his powerful hand and been forced into new 
paths : Spain alone for twenty years had seemed hardly 
to perceive the universal tempest. The French troops 
had stood on the Ebro in 1795, with Castile fully de- 
fenseless before them, and they had evacuated the 
country without the cession of a village. In 1801 
Godoy had roused the utmost fury of Bonaparte ; 1802 
and 1803, conspired with England and Naples in the 
most insulting manner; and in 1806, believing in the 
invincible spirit of the Prussian army, had issued a 
warlike proclamation against the distant emperor; and 
he had always succeeded in supplicating pardon from 
the most contemptuous despot in Europe. But none 
of the states subject to the Corsican had done so little, 
none might have clone so much, for Napoleon ; and 
now that the whole Napoleonic policy was concentrated 
in the intense desire to humiliate England, and the 
solution of this paramount problem wholly depended 
on the possession of a suitable fleet, he began to turn 
his eyes slowly in the direction of the peninsula, and 
slowly to evolve his mighty plans of conquest. 



628 Charles IV. 

But the unconquerable difficulties arising from the 
peculiarity of the Spanish monarchy, its composition, 
the stubborn and haughty character of the people, the 
nature of the country, and the singular confusion be- 
tween religion and patriotism always existing in the 
Spanish mind, and lashing it to fury on the least insult 
from a stranger, had hardly escaped the transcendent 
clairvoyance of his glance. From 1801 he had busied 
himself more than once with Spanish things. The 
immense successes of the year 1807, leaving him free 
to avenge the insults he had suffered from Godoy; his 
knowledge of the discords in the royal household ; the 
prayers and protestations of father, son, and favorite; 
and the absolute necessity of bending England, — all 
urged him to the marshalling of his myriads on the 
Spanish frontier. Hence the order to General Dupont 
to assemble an army of twenty-five thousand men for 
the expedition into Spain. 

The two corps of Dupont and Moncey seemed to 
him, in 1808, sufficient for the coup intended against 
the centre of Spain ; other divisions were gathered from 
Italy and Germany, and planted at the foot of the 
Pyrenees to cover these. The enigmatical designs of 
the emperor filled Charles IV. with anguish and anx- 
iety ; but they were plain to anybody from November, 
1807 : he wanted to be lord of Spain as he had become 
lord of Italy. The passion of the conqueror blinded 
him : Charles was a fool, a coward, a hen-pecked, con- 
temptible bigot ; Ferdinand was a hypocrite, an igno- 
ramus, a lazy and faithless wire-puller; everybody 
knew Godoy was a scoundrel, the queen a hag : would 
it not be easy to descend with irresistible might on 



Government Paralyzed. 629 

such a mass of incompetency, scatter it to the four 
winds, and install some scion of the Napoleons on the 
throne of St. Ferdinand ? Junot had already solemnly, 
by imperial decree, deposed the house of Braganza at 
Lisbon, and laid upon the land a contribution of one hun- 
dred million francs. The French troops of the north 
began to advance from Burgos and Valladolid toward 
Segovia and Aranda, in the very heart of Spain. The 
conscription of 1809 was about to raise his giant army 
to nine hundred thousand men. The Spanish govern- 
ment, too, as if paralyzed or indifferent, made no sharp 
protest, nor took any measures whatever for the military 
security of the country, either of which might have 
given the eagle-eyed emperor precisely what he wanted. 
— an excuse for a fierce and downright proclamation 
of war. 

Murat, therefore, was sent off in all haste to Bay- 
onne, that he might betake himself thence to Madrid 
at the head of the advancing columns ; the Spanish 
government all the time fancying, or pretending to 
fancy, that Napoleon's object was simply to strengthen 
the Mediterranean and other ports threatened by the 
English ! French troops poured into Spain through 
the Basque Provinces, the Pass of Roncesvalles, on 
Pampelona, and into Catalonia, where General Du- 
hesme installed himself, at Barcelona, in February. 
The fortresses commanding the north were soon en- 
tirely in the hands of the French. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 
REIGN OF FERDINAND VII. 

AS if by a flash of lightning, an intimation of Na- 
poleon's intentions seemed to be at last con- 
veyed to these obtuse Bourbon consciousnesses. The 
royal family prepared for flight. Immense agitation 
shook the peninsula at the deeds of violence perpe- 
trated by the invaders in Navarre and Catalonia. The 
whole responsibility was shifted on the hated govern- 
ment ; for either, as it was said, its accursed ambiguity 
of action had forced the former ally to his evil meas- 
ures, or it was voluntarily surrendering the very bul- 
warks of Spanish independence to the cunning enemy. 
The French, meanwhile, were moving on Madrid, — 
with peaceful intentions all the while ! Godoy and the 
queen resolved to fly from the royal residence of Aran- 
juez, — a sort of Spanish Fontainebleau, filled with 
exquisite gardens, fountains, and palaces ; when the 
people, hearing of it, broke out into frenzy, threw them- 
selves on Godoy's hotel, ruined the luxurious furniture, 
dashed the windows to pieces, threatened to kill him, 
and compelled the king to dismiss the odious minister. 
Charles IV., in a paroxysm of terror, abdicated on the 
19th of March, 1808, and on the plea of "ill-health," 
and to the boundless enthusiasm of the populace, an- 

630 



Murat at Madrid. 631 

nounced Ferdinand VII. as his successor. An era of 
universal happiness seemed about to dawn, for was not 
the martyr Ferdinand king ? was not Godoy deposed 
and about to be executed ? and the imbecile king and 
the termagant queen forever relegated to private life ? 
And the two thousand millions of Godoy's stolen prop- 
erty would largely pay the national debt ! 

Murat, even when a few miles from Madrid, knew no 
more of Napoleon's intentions than one of his own 
subordinate generals; and he had hitherto begged un- 
availingly for enlightenment. His own passionate am- 
bition was to be made king of this beautiful and wealthy 
realm; would it be fulfilled? 

The queen meanwhile had bitterly rued the prema- 
ture abdication of her easily intimidated and easily 
governed husband. She now began a series of in- 
trigues with Murat, crying for help against her " rebel- 
lious " son. Murat surprised Ferdinand by recognizing 
only Charles IV. as king of Spain, though the lovely 
spring day on which the new monarch made his tri- 
umphal entry into Madrid showed Murat the population 
in a state of indescribable joy and unanimity over his 
accession, while the nation almost to a man hailed him 
as a deliverer. Forty thousand French, now in the 
metropolis, began to maintain a menacing attitude, 
under shelter of whom Charles recalled his " forced " 
abdication, and the queen and her daughter described 
their son and brother to the foreign general as the 
blackest ingrate and schemer. 

Now came the opportunity for Napoleon. He suc- 
ceeded in alluring first Ferdinand, then, a few days 
after, his father, mother, and their faithful " Manuel " 



632 Reign of Ferdinand VII. 

(Godoy), to Bayonne, holding out to them the prospect 
of a vague settlement, the necessity of an interview, 
consultations over what was to be done for Spain, etc. 
With incredible complacency both parties — now mortal 
rivals — fell into the net. A government so long con- 
sisting simply of the prime minister could not be hard 
to frighten. Difficult indeed, however, was the manipu- 
lation of this haughty people, who felt themselves out- 
raged, degraded, scandalized to the core by the un- 
seemly haste of the unhasting Spanish majesties to 
throw themselves into the arms of the magnificent up- 
start. Ferdinand was expostulated with. It was of no 
avail : he rushed on his fate like a true Bourbon, and, 
once across the frontier, was treated by Napoleon with 
one indignity after another. He was forced — some 
say under fear of death — to abdicate; Charles IV. 
was reinstated, but refused obstinately to return to 
Spain ; and for the pitiable mess of pottage of a French 
palace and a sum of money, surrendered his birthright 
of the immemorial crown of Hispania to the truculent 
invader. 

By this time the 2d of May — date ever memorable 
in the annals of the peninsula — had dawned on the 
people of Madrid, where a junta composed of grandees 
and dignitaries represented the Spanish government, so 
shamefully abandoned by its kings. The effort to en- 
tice the remaining members of the royal family to Bay- 
onne filled the huge masses of peasantry, who had 
flocked to the capital to witness the Sunday parade of 
the imperial guard, with deep-murmuring indignation. 
A collision ensued: then a frightful massacre of the 
innocent spectators ; then for a week all the corpora- 




£A&tyU£ i5U£.r£Lfc.iUy, ixvyVl^Ut. O* ALAYA, 



Depression, 685 

tions of the overawed city did homage to Murat as 
governor-general of the empire. Spain was being prop- 
erly reduced to order! 

Did not Charles IV. , with his newly obtained civil 
list of thirty millions of reals, — "with the integrity of 
his empire maintained," " the Roman Catholic Apostolic 
religion alone tolerated in Spain," " the prince whom 
the emperor shall place on the vacant throne independ- 
ent," — shiver in his imperial palace of Compiegne 
as he watched these things ? And Ferdinand ? who, 
for his pretty behavior in so gracefully abdicating, had 
pocketed an income of 1,100,000 francs, and was to be 
entertained by the Talleyrand s at Chateau Valencay, 
with theatre, comedians, the possibility of an intrigue 
with some joliefille^ attached. 

The powerful fleet — 76 ships of the line and 51 
frigates — of the time of Charles III. had been suf- 
fered to fall to pieces; the absolutely worthless govern- 
ment had, during Charles IV.'s twenty years' reign, 
added but 5 ships of the line and 12 frigates to the fleet, 
in 1808 ! And of these many were unseaworthy. The 
condition of the arsenals and navy-yards was deplor- 
able. The army, nominally 120,000 strong, really 
amounted to only 60,000 with which to oppose Napo- 
leon ; and there were under the generalissimo 5 cap- 
tains-general, 87 lieutenants-general, 127 field-marshals, 
252 brigadier-generals, and 2,000 colonels! 

As for finances, there were none. The state debt 
amounted at this period to more than seven milliards 
of reals, but one-third of which was due to earlier gov- 
ernments. And the Castiles had lost one-third of their 
population by epidemics and famines. 



636 Reign of Ferdinand VIL 

Such was the gift which the " grand pioneer of new 
forms of life, the consummator of God's revolutionary 
judgments on ancient Europe," was about to make to 
his eldest brother, Joseph, then king of Naples, with 
the pretended sanction of the representative bodies of 
Spain. 

It is undeniable, however, that the ripest and most 
honest conviction of many of the most distinguished 
Spaniards inclined to the emperor, nauseated as they 
were with the paternal charivari of the Bourbons, now 
as loathsome as the dynasty of Habsburgers. The 
mighty mass of the people, however, — that deep, 
slumbering, loyal, long-suffering mob, — shrieked at 
the brutal despotism of the emperor, at last awake to 
the enormous responsibilities of the hour. Not since 
the Arabian invasion had flooded the land from Cadiz 
to the Asturias, under Taric, had such an invasion im- 
pended. The noblest men of the eighteenth century, 
like Campomanes and Jovellanos, were Asturians ; and 
out of the Asturias, for the second time, the tide of 
resistance was to flood, before which the hitherto resist- 
less conqueror was to bend. The Asturians, piercing 
the impenetrable veil that hung over the emperor's 
projects, sprang to arms in May, 1808, and declared 
solemn war on Napoleon. A single week sufficed to 
transform the whole of Spain, from the Cantabrian Sea 
to the Bay of Cadiz, and from the Ocean to the Medi- 
terranean, into a sea of flame. 

Of the hundred and fifty deputies called by Napoleon 
to Bayonne, to give national sanction to Joseph's pre- 
tensions and draw up a constitution, only ninety-one ap- 
peared. The gentle and accomplished Joseph loathed 



Joseph Bonaparte. 637 

the idea of forcing himself on a gallant people ; but, 
overwhelmed by the prayers and reproaches of his broth- 
er, lie yielded, and hoped to win the hearts of his new 
subjects by kindness, intelligence, and good government. 
In July he set off from Bayonne with his new constitution 
in his . pocket, — doubtless a great improvement on pre- 
existing ones. Engagements with the insurgents took 
place almost simultaneously. Saragossa underwent its 
first brilliant siege with sublime heroism, and was fired to 
the loftiest pitch of exaltation by the valor of the two- 
and-twenty-year-old Maid of Saragossa ; and its success- 
ful resistance worked indescribably on the rest of Spain. 
The defeat of the Spaniards at Rio Seco greatly de- 
lighted Napoleon. 

Joseph, who had now entered Madrid, found his posi- 
tion every clay becoming more desperate, amid a popu- 
lation absolutely untamable. A French* army under 
Marshal Moncey was beaten back from Valencia; an- 
other under Dupont and Reding, plunging too deeply 
into xA^ndalusia in its efforts to protect the French 
squadron lying at Cadiz, capitulated to Castanos, at 
Baylen, July 21, 1808, to the number of more than seven- 
teen thousand men. Joseph fled instantly from his cap- 
ital of a week, followed by not a soul of his two thou- 
sand domestics. At Burgos he took breath, while the 
news made the emperor writhe with fury. " I'll send 
you Ney and one hundred thousand men, and in the 
autumn Spain shall be ours ! " 

But it took six tempestuous and irretrievable years 
before not Spain, but Bonaparte, was conquered ! 

How bitterly Joseph repented exchanging " les doux 
loisirs du trone de Naples,'' for that Madrid where, even 



638 Spain under Joseph Bonaparte. 

as king, it was said that his dreaded brother reigned a 
hundred times more than he did ! And nine-tenths of 
his kingdom was in rebellion, while the French generals 
who had captured Barcelona, Burgos, and Vittoria, 
were virtually the prisoners of their conquest. 

In Portugal, the arrival of Sir Arthur Wellesley, in 
July, 1808, at the head of ten thousand English, gave a 
nucleus about which the insurrection could gather, — a 
movement due to the luminous foresight of Canning, 
who saw that Spain must be England's battle-ground in 
this struggle of giants. Reinforcements from England 
soon raised his troops to thirty thousand. The over- 
throw of the French at Yimeiro, August, 1808, com- 
pelled Junot to sign the convention of Cintra, by which 
the French army was compelled to evacuate Lisbon and 
Portugal, though with all the honors of war. The invinci- 
ble legions were defeated ; the beginning of the end was 
at hand ; the colossal pride of Napoleon was humbled. 

He resolved himself to come to Spain and superin- 
tend the vast military operations he was about to inau- 
gurate against the twelve or fifteen local and even mu- 
tually hostile governments then existing in that country. 
The supreme junta sat at Aranjuez under the presidency 
of Floridablanca. Sir John Moore was now the com- 
mander-in-chief of the English forces in Portugal. The 
Spaniards had a foretaste of Napoleon in the bonfires 
of Burgos, — fed by the furniture and musical instru- 
ments of the city ; while the emperor himself crossed 
the Guadarramas and descended on Madrid, where he 
arrived on the anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, 
December 2, 1808. By several successive decrees he 
abolished the Inquisition, suppressed the lines of cus- 



Napoleon in Spain. 639 

tom-houses that separated the provinces, and formed the 
great obstacle to the unity of the peninsula, and with a 
stroke of his pen annihilated the feudal rights which 
were the basis of the power of the grandees. Joseph 
had returned to Madrid among other impedimenta, and 
imagined himself now firmly seated on his throne, more 
especially as Blake had been defeated in the North. 
Sir John Moore was defeated and slain in 1809, by 
Soult, at the battle of Corufia, and the Spanish armies 
fled right and left before the serried masses of the French. 

In January, 1809, the emperor, impelled by the arma- 
ments of Austria and the apprehension of a continental 
war, quitted Spain, leaving the incapable Joseph "camp- 
ing rather than reigning at Madrid." The wondrous 
second siege of Saragossa in 1809, conducted for the 
Spanish by the heroic Palafox, and for the French by 
Lannes, a siege lasting fifty days, during which one- 
third of a garrison of forty thousand were placed hors de 
combat and the twelve thousand that surrendered pre- 
ferred prison to the service of Joseph — gave the gentle- 
hearted king another taste of that bitter disillusion 
which he had all along been poignantly expressing to 
his mother. And Palafox, dragged half dead to the 
dungeon of Vincennes, symbolized the unbending spirit 
of the people. 

The same year (1809) saw Soult's unsuccessful expe- 
dition to Portugal, — a disaster due largely to the un- 
changeable plans of the emperor, who, five hundred 
leagues from the scene of action, insisted that his plans 
of campaign should be executed ; and to disobey was 
worse than to be defeated. 

More fatal than all, dazzled by the hope of planting 



640 Spain under Joseph Bonaparte. 

his victorious eagles in Lisbon, he had left Spain, after 
his brief and triumphant campaign, in the hands of eight 
or nine ambitious and irreconcilable generals ; Soult 
in Portugal, Victor at Merida, Jourdan at Madrid, Mortier 
and Suchet in Aragon, Saint Cyr at Barcelona, Keller- 
mann at Valladolid, Bonnet in Biscay, and Lapisse at 
Salamanca,— between whom bitter rivalries existed ; who 
each, perhaps, hankered after independent principalities ; 
and who could with difficulty, if at all, be brought to 
act together on a concerted plan. Strangest of all, the 
emperor was in profound error as to the disposition of 
the inhabitants, who, he curiously enough thought, would 
" aid the French in suppressing the insurrection." 

Wellesley now commanded in Portugal; Carvajal, La 
Cuesta, and La Romana commanded the three Spanish 
armies of the. centre, west and north, while there were 
innumerable groups of insurgents without commanders. 

The gross vanity, incapacity, and carelessness of 
Soult were no match for the clear vision and cold 
manceuvering of Wellesley. Portugal was miserably 
lost for France, and a fatal blow dealt by the check to 
the morale and discipline of its armies. The second 
Andalusian expedition of 1809-10 was more mischiev- 
ous in consequences than the first. Soult, lately so dis- 
honorably driven by the English from Oporto, was 
named generalissimo of the three armies of Galicia, 
Portugal, and old Castile, and became, in the absence 
of the emperor, the real king of Spain. In the great 
battle of Talavera (July, 1809), the advantage ultimately 
remained on the side of the allied armies. In the 
Andalusian movements, though Cordova, Seville, and 
Granada fell into the hands of the French, they were 




LA FUENTE DEL CISNE (FOUNTAIN OF THE SWAN), MADRID. 



Wellington at Lisbon. 643 

open, indefensible cities, while Cadiz, the key of Anda- 
lusia in a military and political sense, escaped. From 
hence, as once from the remote corners of Galicia and 
Asturias, the regeneration of Spain was to come. 

The third French expedition to Portugal, under Mas- 
sena, shattered against Wellington's impregnable lines 
of Torres Vedras — one of the most gigantic works 
ever executed, covering five hundred English square 
miles of surface, and consisting of a triple series of 
enormous fortifications, defended by six hundred can- 
non, the object of which was to protect the approaches 
to Lisbon. This was the third time that Wellington 
had purged Portugal of the presence of French soldiers. 

The assembling of the national cortes in September, 
1810, at Cadiz, was of supreme importance, and its 
installation terminated the mission of the regency pre- 
viously in office as the highest tribunal of the country. 
General Blake, Admiral Ciscar, and Captain Agar, 
were named the successors of the former five regents. 
Though the yellow fever raged in the city, the cortes 
refused to abandon it, and in 18 12 effected its capital 
work, the "Constitution of 1812." 

This constitution inaugurated representative govern- 
ment in Spain, abolished torture, the Inquisition, and 
most of the convents, founded the liberty of the citizen 
and the press, and improved the judiciary. The seign- 
orial rights attached to thirteen thousand three hundred 
and nine out of the twenty-five thousand three hundred 
and twenty villages of the peninsula were abolished, 
and though the nine thousand men's convents of 1626 
had fallen to two thousand and fifty in 1808, these were 
considerably reduced. But unfortunately this brilliant 



644 Spain under Joseph Bonaparte. 

constitution died even before it was born, and was sue 
ceecled by an absolute monarchy which utterly crushed 
it. 

The military operations of the years 18 10-12, con- 
ducted by Soult against Badajoz, Victor and Marmont 
against Cadiz, and Saint Cyr and Suchet in Catalonia 
and Valencia, employed a force of four hundred thousand 
French, and might have resulted in the entire conquest of 
Spain, had not Napoleon, now (18 12) intent on his cel- 
ebrated Russian campaign, withdrawn many troops from 
Spain, and thereby hopelessly weakened his prospects 
in that country. 

Under such circumstances beating Wellington and a 
nation almost immeasurably endowed with patience, 
enthusiasm, and power of resistance, — a nation that 
had fought the Moors for a thousand years and were 
fully equal to fighting Napoleon and bis marshals foi 
six, — was impossible. Wellington's genius triumphed 
brilliantly in the great battle of Salamanca, July, 1812; 
Joseph evacuated Madrid in haste and retired to Valen- 
cia ; the treacherous Soult withdrew from Andalusia 
(August, 1812); and the two and a half years' siege 
of Cadiz was raised. 

Though Joseph returned for a brief space to Madrid, 
the year 18 13 saw the evacuation of Spain by the 
enemy. Wellington, now generalissimo of the Spanish 
armies, won the famous battle of Vittoria in June, 1813, 
over King Joseph, and ended almost at a blow the dis- 
mal tragedy which, really begun in 1807 by the inva- 
sion of Portugal, was rendered utterly abortive by 
this last disaster in 18 13. Annexation of the Ebro 
provinces, as the Spanish frontier of France, was a 



Bourbons Restored. 645 

dream no longer to be realized. The French were in 
full retreat, flowing torrent-fashion through that Pass of 
Roncesvalles, which in Charlemagne's time had proved 
so fatal to their countrymen. Eighty thousand men 
remained of the four hundred thousand that had been 
poured into this bottomless pit of blood. 

Returning to Paris in 1813, the emperor began nego- 
tiations with the prisoner of Valencay, with whom a treaty 
was signed December 11, 1813. Joseph was deposed; 
Ferdinand was reinstated. In 18 14 a double restor- 
ation took place, in France and in Spain, of the ancient 
Bourbon dynasty — a dynasty whose characteristic it 
was, never to understand the necessities of the times 
nor the instincts of the countries it had to rule. Louis 
XVIII. in France, and Ferdinand VII. in the peninsula, 
represented ignobly enough the principle of divine 
right and passive obedience. The allies entered Paris 
in March, 18 14, and the emperor, caught in an inextri- 
cable net, was a prisoner on the island of Elba. 

On his arrival in his dominions in March, 18 14, three 
suggestions were made to Ferdinand, relative to the 
constitution of 18 12 : to swear to it, not to swear, or to 
swear with mental reservations. His perfidious charac- 
ter prompted to the last. 

The South American colonies meanwhile had not es- 
caped the tremendous political agitations then revolu- 
tionizing Europe. The impulse towards entire emanci- 
pation from the mother-country started in 1808, and 
was consummated in the independence of Mexico in 
1829. It was gloriously shown that " Christopher Co- 
lumbus had not conquered the New World to feed the 
muleteers of La Mancha and the cobblers of Castile." 



646 Ferdinand VII. 

The revolt broke out at Caraccas, in Venezuela (1810). 
Then came the turn of Buenos Ayres, at the other 
extremity of the continent ; New Granada, Paraguav, 
Chili, Mexico, with varying success. Bolivar and Sucre 
assured the independence of Peru in 1824-26. And 
all that kept that " dust of republics, incessantly swept 
by the wind of revolution," from unifying into one 
huge South American federal organization, was the im- 
mense and compact monarchy of Brazil, flourishing 
anew under the House of Braganza. 

In May, 1814, — the year of the great congress of 
Vienna — the last smothered cry of the national cortes 
was suppressed. The deputies were arrested ; the 
memorial stone of the Constitution, erected in the pub- 
lic squares of the cities, overturned ; and no trace of 
protest either from people or army was heard. At last 
there was a king again. 

The day which saw the liberation of the country 
from the yoke of the stranger, saw it almost hopelessly 
sink beneath the yoke of its well-beloved king, — the 
incarnation of cruel, base, "tricky"' absolutism, a vile 
debauchee, " beginning and ending in blood and mud." 

The three periods of Ferdinand's reign embrace the 
six years, from his return to Madrid in 18 14 to the revo- 
lution of i82o_, and the resurrection of the cortes and 
Constitution of 181 2 : the second extends from 1820 
to the capture of Cadiz, and the fall of constitutional 
government in 1823 ; and the last, from 1823 to Ferdi- 
nand's death in 1833. The period between 1808 and 
18 1 4 was interrupted by exile and the usurpation of 
Joseph Bonaparte. 

The first period saw the recall of the Jesuits ; the 



! 1 



(■' \ 



vm\ 



\0"4 



, i 









C j^-U^ 




BASQUE PEASANT. 



A New Despotism, 649 

elite of Spain, such as Arg-uelles, Martinez de la Rosa, 
and Herreros, condemned to the galleys ; the liberal 
constitutional party proscribed ; the free-masons extend- 
ing their vast hidden system over the land as a perma- 
nent conspiracy against the encroachments of crown 
and clergy ; monarchical terrorism organized, and the 
noble outburst in Andalusia (1820) headed by Riego, 
whose name, given to the national hymn, has become 
famous as the synonyme of constitutionalism in Spain. 

In March, 1820, Ferdinand was compelled by the 
popular clamor to convoke the cortes ; to confide the 
principal portfolios to liberals drawn from the galleys 
(Herreros, Perez de Castro, and the two Arguelles) ; to 
abolish the Inquisition forever ; to free the press, and 
to re-establish the national militia. 

Civil war broke out in May, 1822, and with it came 
misery, famine, and ruin. The Holy Alliance, led by 
France, intervened ; the Due d'Angouieme, at the head 
of one hundred and fifty thousand men, entered the 
peninsula in 1823, to crush the insurgents, restore a 
"scion of Henry IV. to the throne," and hand over 
the devoted land to ten years more of proscription and 
torture with the restoration of Ferdinand who, tempora- 
rily set aside, had been carried off a prisoner by his 
subjects to Cadiz. 

Ferdinand owed his second deliverance (1823) to 
France, as he had owed his first to England. The fall 
of Cadiz — the liberation of the king — endowed Spain 
with a new despotism more concentrated than ever. At 
Saragossa, in the course of a few days, fifteen hundred 
persons were cast into prison ; death was decreed 
against the three constitutional regents who had been 



650 



Ferdinand VII. 



appointed to govern the country in his place ; a secret 
police sowed terror and dissension everywhere. The 
frightful atrocities perpetrated by the king's order, on 
the rebels of Catalonia, were memorable even in this 
reign of rosaries, blood, and voluptuousness. 




Ferdinand VII. 



In 1829, the last of the Ferdinands married as his 
fourth wife — he was without heir — his niece, Maria 
Christina, daughter of the king of Naples and sister of 
the Duchess de Berry. 

The finances of the kingdom were hopelessly out of 
order; an annual expense of seven hundred million reals 
could hardly be met by an annual revenue of four hun- 
dred millions. The revolution of 1830 in France, with 
the expulsion of the Bourbons, caused the intensely ex- 



A Question of Succession. 



651 



cited Spaniards to desire their revolution of July and 
their citizen king, while Ferdinand, absolutely rotting 
on his throne with gout, debauchery, superstition, and 
ferocity, seemed but little capable of resisting, in his 
enfeebled health, the stress and storm of the times. 
The question of the succession now began to occupy 




\l 



■ 



ft '. i'*-. r ^-^ f ' 



Maria Christina. 
the dying king. The well-known decree of Philip V. 
in 17 13, transformed by cortes into the fundamental 
law of the kingdom, had decided that women could 
succeed only in default of male heirs, not onlv in the 
direct but in the collateral branches. The cortes of 
1789 abolished the Salic law, and was confirmed in 



652 Ferdinand VII. 

its course by the cortes of 1812, keeping in mind the 
ever-glorious reign of Isabella the Catholic. In 1830, 
Ferdinand had this law, — already half a century old, 
— formally promulgated, in anticipation of the pos- 
sible birth of a daughter, and that he might exclude 
his brother Don Carlos and his heirs from the succes- 
sion. The birth of Maria Isabella II., October 18, 
1830, justified these precautions, though Don Carlos, 
born one year before the Pragmatic Sanction of 1789, 
had an absolute right to the throne in default of heirs 
male to his brother. 

A conspiracy headed by Don Carlos and his " Apos- 
tolical " party, wrenched from the half unconscious 
monarch, the annulling of the Pragmatic Sanction, to 
the intense indignation of the country, which was 
almost unanimously for Christina. Ferdinand fortu- 
nately returned to himself and, urged by his energetic 
sister-in-law, Charlotte, revoked the consent, to the 
horror of the court party, the reactionary clergy, most 
of the captains-general, and the fanatical northern 
provinces. The young queen, made regent, became 
immensely popular by her first decrees, which pro- 
claimed a general amnesty and .re-opened the universi- 
ties — "the reaction having found no other means of 
preventing the revolution of July from crossing the 
Pyrenees than by dedicating Spain to ignorance. " A 
period of so-called "enlightened despotism," under 
the administration of Zea Bermudez, set in. The 
cortes reassembled in Madrid in 1833 an ^ swore obe- 
dience to the queen-regent and to the infant queen. 
War from that moment was declared between the Chris- 
tinos and Carlists — a war which has lasted intermittently 



Eternal Civil War. 653 

to our times. In September, 1833, Spain was deliv- 
ered from the most odious and fatal ruler that ever op- 
pressed and crushed a noble people ; and the legacy he 
left, was an eternal civil war. 

The conspirator of the Escorial ; the rebel of Aran- 
juez; the robber of his father's crown; the worm 
squirming at the feet of his enemy at Bayonne ; the 
captive of Valencay, begging bits of colored ribbon 
from Napoleon while his people were pouring out their 
blood and gold to give him back his crown ; the jailer 
of the illustrious statesmen to whom he owed the res- 
toration of that crown ; the perjured villain, who spon- 
taneously engaged to be true to the constitution of 1812, 
and then conspired to overthrow it the day after he had 
sworn ; the promoter of anarchy during the three years 
of constitutional government; the invoker of the Holy 
Alliance and the intervention of France ; the author 
of innumerable proscriptions ; the coarse voluptuary : 
Ferdinand leaves no memory but that of a man worth} 
of our profoundest scorn. 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

THE REGENCY. — ISABELLA II. — AMADEUS. — THE 
REPUBLIC — ALFONSO XII. 

THE flocking of the liberals round the popular 
queen-regent seemed auspicious of happy conse- 
quences for Spain. But even before the king's death, 
indefatigable Carlist intriguers were working for Don 
Carlos. Was Don Carlos or Isabella to succeed ? As 
the king, up to his last moment, had done absolutely 
nothing to secure the future of his wife and infant 
daughter from the horrors of an unending dispute, 
speculation was rife as to the sovereign to come. 

Hardly was the breath out of the body of Ferdinand. 
who, for seven years had been subject to choking fits. 
when everybody rushed to " hear his will : Civil War !" 
Almost simultaneously the Carlists rose in Vizcaya and 
Alava ; the insurrection sprang up nearly everywhere 
over Spain. A council of regency, which represented 
the liberal opposition against Zea, was formed, whose 
object it was to assist the queen, carry on the govern- 
ment, and quell the insurrection. The Carlists, headed 
by the celebrated parson of Villoviado, Don Geronimo 
Merino, — originally a goat-herd, of inimitable audacity, 
activity, and a cruelty that shrank from no excess, — 
gathered in great force in old Castile ; but were de- 
feated, and driven over the border to Don Carlos. A 

654 



The Basques. 655 

momentary lull set in, which it will be well to employ 
by a slight characterization of the Basques and their 
history, the proper pivot and nucleus of this intermin- 
able rebellion. 

The Basques occupy an isolated position both in ori- 
gin and language among the nations of F,urope. Not 
only have they preserved their hitherto unclassified 
ttmgue with strange obstinacy from the earliest times, 
but the popular life, the customs, the independence of 
the people, surviving Romans, Goths, and Arabs, live 
on in undisturbed vigor at the present day. In the 
great Habsburg wars with France, in the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, the Basques became the natural 
guardians of the important western frontier on the 
Spanish side. When the Catalans, at the eastern ex- 
tremity of the Pyrenees, yielded to Richelieu's allure- 
ments, and threw off the yoke of the Castilians, it is 
well known that this event contributed to the over- 
throw of the general supremacy of Spain. Had the 
Basques in the west acted similarly, the results might 
have been beyond calculation. But as they remained 
loyal, it appeared of little importance whether the few 
hundred thousand mountaineers paid more or fewer 
taxes, and the Castilians came readily to grant the poor 
mountain folk a privileged position in consideration of 
the great services they were capable of rendering. 
Among their privileges was the famous " nobility of 
blood,'' according to which all Basques were of noble 
birth, and enjoyed, both at home and elsewhere in 
Spain, all the prerogatives of nobility — a privilege fully 
established in their favor in 1582, and unconditionally 
reaffirmed by Philip III. in 1608, to the pique of the 



6&6 Basque Provinces. 

Castilian hidalgos. Far from being satisfied, however, 
with their large measure of local independence, they 
gradually came to decline their part of the burdens of 
the government, formed with their three provinces and 
the allied kingdom of Navarre a sort of sovereign state 
within the state, were freed from the taxes exacted from 
the other provinces, gave the monarch only voluntary 
gifts, and were exempted from the customs system o*f 
the realm, from regular recruiting for the army, and 
from calling out their troops except in vivid emergen- 
cies. The king was not permitted to keep troops in 
their land except in certain towns; and the administra- 
tive and judicial organization of the rest of the realm 
was foreign to them. 

Thus sundered from the rest of Spain, these four 
provinces were no less so among themselves ; and all 
that held them together at all, was the moral bond of 
their essentially similar fueros. Every spot watched 
with lynx eyes over its own independence ; feuds raged 
between the various villages, valleys, and fraternities ; 
and everything moved within the circle of a sharply de- 
fined individuality which formed the delight of Jean- 
Jacques Rousseau. The constitution of Alava, Guipuz- 
coa, and Navarre, however, harmonized essentially with 
that of Vizcaya ; a glance at the latter will be tolerably 
applicable to the remainder of the Pyreneean sister- 
hood. 

The fueros of Vizcaya were comprehensively revised 
in 1452, 1526, and 1527, and recognized the reigning 
monarch not as king but as lord. The government was 
conducted by a deputation, two out of whose three 
members were chosen by the popular assembly, the 



Basque Prosperity. 657 

third — called corregidor — being appointed by the king 
from among the natives of the country. The Junta 
General 'was the real organ of the sovereignty of Vizcaya, 
at which the deputies of each place met annually once, 
under the venerable oak of of Guernica. The compe- 
tent house-owners of pure Biscayan blood had the right 
to choose the representative of the town or village, and 
to instruct him for the sitting. Common interests were 
discussed and decided as the deputies sat on the bench 
under the great oak, and listened to the reports of the 
deputation. The delegates, dividing into two parts, 
drew by lot three electors, who then named several per- 
sons among whom lots again decided as to which should 
form the two deputies and the six corregidores, the latter 
being a committee of the classes, consisting of six cor- 
regidores chosen by the popular assembly as an adjunct 
to the deputation. 

The Basques had remained, fortunately, free from the 
influence of the evil tendencies to which the monarchy 
since Charles V. had gradually given way. The mis- 
chievous system of taxing food, and the provincial reve- 
nues, the suicidal customs scheme existing between the 
various principalities, and the monstrous corruption of 
officials and judges, remained far from these mountains. 
Hence, agriculture flourished in a fashion unknown to 
Castile ; the harbors were full of ships ; industrial en- 
terprise, mining, iron-founding, went on vigorously. 
The valleys were, owing to the vicinity of the Pyrenees 
and the rich abundance of water, Edens of verdure, 
though the mode of cultivation and the agricultural im- 
plements were of the most primitive description. But 
the rudest two-wheeled Basque wagon, the most antedi- 



658 Basque Provinces. 

luvian laya, were preferable to the hopeless indolence 
of the Castilian. Beggary, monastery soup, the idle 
filth of central Spain, were unknown. The loveliness of 
the country, the industry, genial prosperity, and noble 
patriotism of the people, and the comfortable appear- 
ance of the towns and villages, roused the admit a- 
tion of Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1799. According to 
the census of 1797, only fourteen hamlets had become 
despoblado or abandoned, in the Basque provinces, — a 
feature so characteristic of Spain — while there were 
more than nine hundred of them elsewhere. Manorial 
taxes did not exist among the Basques. The home of 
Loyola could not of course be free from monastic estab- 
lishments ; but the regular clergy counterbalanced the 
monks, and schools flourished more than monasteries. 
While Absolutism made but rare and unsuccessful at- 
tempts to subject the Basques to its uniform order, 
Liberalism, in the radical form it assumed elsewhere in 
Spain, was distasteful to them, especially as it failed to 
tolerate these exasperating privileges. Hence, the 
Basques were prepared to fight to the death against the 
Constitution of 1812. in support of the independence 
of their ancient faeros. The restoration of 1823 had 
restored their privileges, momentarily threatened in 
1820. The whole Basque land stood with unanimity 
on the "servile"' side as opposed to liberalism. They 
had never suffered from the absolute king; their clergy 
were dear to them ; the liberals seemed to them violent 
tyrants, against whom their immemorial rights must be 
protected, as lately against the French. The liberal 
party therefore had nowhere fewer adherents than in 
these remote mountains. 



■ 







TWO LADIES. 

^KRTCH MADE AT ALICANTE. 



Don Carlos. 661 

Hence, the great influence which Don Carlos exerted 
in the Basque provinces, when it was skilfully sprinkled 
among the simple-minded, liberty-loving bigots that 
Don Carlos had always protected their cause against 
the arbitrary abolition tendencies of the liberals, that 
to him alone was due the salvation of their fueros. A 
curious paradox was the result : the freest and most 
active-spirited provinces of Spain, which reminded Hum- 
boldt irresistibly, in situation, constitution, and vivacity, 
of the small free states of Greece, became the chief 
prop and mainstay of the powers of darkness, intoler- 
ance, and servitude, that swarmed under the banner of 
Don Carlos ! 

And the first commanding personality that Spain had 
produced in forty years, — Tomas Zumalacarregui, — 
was, by force of circumstances, to throw his genius into 
the Carlist cause and prolong the death-struggle of Old 
Spain seven bloody and destructive years. 

Originally an officer in the royal army, Zumala- 
carregui had been forced by the bitter injustice of his 
superiors to proclaim boldly that his sympathies were 
with Don Carlos. He became commanding general of 
Navarre, Guipuzcoa, and Vizcaya, beat and baffled the 
Christinos in numberless conflicts, and developed the 
guerrilla warfare into a brilliant science which men- 
aced the very foundations of the established govern- 
ment. 

It would be fruitless to linger over the myriad coali- 
tions and ministries, the attacks of the opposition, the 
intrigues of diplomacy, the irresolution of the govern- 
ment wherever and whenever tact and vigor were neces- 
sary to the very existence of the state, the excitement 



'662 Christina. 

roused by the scandalous indecorum of the queen-re- 
gent, the admonitions of foreign cabinets, the dismis- 
sal of ministers, all through the ten years from the 
death of Ferdinand to the flight of Espartero. The 
one bright spot in the early part of Christina's regency 
was the comprehensive system of organization put forth 
by the great Spanish statesman, Burgos. Burgos was an 
accomplished student of the policy of Campomanes and 
Jovellanos ; his brain teemed with an infinite wealth of 
knowledge and ideas ; his memorable " instruction," 
sent out to the magistrates, embraced in great and yet 
practicable outlines the most important regulations con- 
cerning agriculture, industry, trade, mining, popular 
representation, general police, public instruction, eco- 
nomic associations, irrigation, forestry, weights and 
measures, bull-fights, sanitary and prison reform, roads, 
canals, public libraries, museums, theatres, and places 
of popular amusement. And yet, for the moment, the 
state possessed not a realiox the accomplishment of his 
enlightened measures, the universities having been 
closed for years ; whereas, schools for bull-fighters had 
been founded at considerable expense ! 

Many of these reforms, however, went gradually into 
effect. Burgos succeeded in abolishing the system of 
guilds by which the handworkers were oppressed, the 
wretched restrictions under which the once so flourish- 
ing sheep, cattle, and wine culture was languishing, 
and the senseless prescriptions that hampered the free 
sale of provisions ; rendered all the professions and 
handicrafts honorable by opening to all of them the 
public offices of the communities, and even the doors 
of the nobility, previously closed by the laws of Charles 




HEROES OF THE CARLIST WAR 



Imprisonment. 665 

III. ; censured and restrained the passion for bull- 
baiting ; protected the theatre ; and at a stroke, by his 
decree reorganizing the whole prison system, lifted his 
land out of the utmost savagery in this regard to a level 
with modern civilization. 

The painful suspense in which the country had been 
kept for many decades past, vacillating as it had been 
between the most dismal absolutism and the extremest 
liberalism, and not as yet arrived at any intelligent or 
intelligible freedom, seemed about to be closed by the 
well-known Estatuto Real, or Royal Statute, of April 10, 
1834. Though not by any means lavish of rights and 
liberties, this statute worked a great progress in com- 
parison with the state of things that had existed for 
three hundred years. It excelled in very essential 
points, in real and permanent advantages, the declama- 
tory and much-vaunted Constitution of 18 12. It dis- 
tributed the powers in such a manner between crown, 
clergy, nobility, and popular interests, that each seemed 
content and had better guarantees than the Constitu- 
tion of 18 1 2 had offered. The cortes was to be sum- 
moned ; and it was to consist of two bodies, Proceres 
and Procuradoi-es. The Proceres were constituted of the 
higher clergy, the grandees, prominent dignitaries such 
as ministers, ambassadors, generals, judges, and wealthy 
manufacturers, or owners of real estate with an income 
of three thousand dollars. They held office for life, 
from the age of twenty-five. The president and vice- 
president were chosen by the king at each meeting of 
the cortes. The other house consisted of deputies with 
an income of at least six hundred dollars, and its presi- 
dent and vice-president were likewise chosen by die 



QQ6 Christina. 

king from a group of five selected by the deputies 
themselves. They were elected for three years, were 
re-eligible, and must be natives or inhabitants, for at 
least two years previous, of the province from which 
they came. The king could summon, suspend, or dis- 
solve cortes, and had to swear to uphold the constitu- 
tion and laws. The right of petition was recognized. 
The execution of the laws was subject to the sanction 
of the king and the two houses. All taxes were voted 
by the cortes, — which was called together whenever 
deemed necessary by the king, — on the proposal of 
the king, and could be imposed for not more than two 
years. Reports from the various ministries were re- 
quired. Dissolution of cortes was followed by the 
re-assembling of the new one within a year. Members 
of both houses were inviolable so far as concerned 
the votes and opinions given in the discharge of their 
duty. 

The statute was thus seen to contain most of the requi- 
sites of constitutional government ; its defects lay 
more in externals, in tone, than in essence ; and it 
based itself happily on the ancient fundamental laws of 
the kingdom. The chief difficulty in its way lay in the 
abnormal condition of society, the irreconcilable con- 
trasts of religious and secular opinion, greatly aggra- 
vated as they had been by the restoration and revolu- 
tion, and the curious antagonism between the class 
which clung passionately to the moral and religious tra- 
ditions of the past, and the class steeped in the fash- 
ionable French radicalism and emancipation from every 
moral and religious bond. Nowhere is this abnormal 
state of things, — are the innumerable wounds under 



Cholera at Madrid, 667 

which Spanish society was then suffering, — more 
graphically dragged to the light than in the caustic and 
incisive pages of the great contemporary satirist, Larra. 

The Quadruple Alliance of the same year, between 
Spain, Portugal, England and France, strengthened the 
foreign relations of Spain, and united, loosely enough 
to be sure, the four powers in their plan of expelling 
Don Carlos from Spain, and the Portuguese pretender, 
Don Miguel, from Portugal. Don Miguel laid down 
his arms, and Don Carlos, then in Portugal, escaped to 
England in an English (! I ship, whence he speedily set 
out in disguise for Spain. His arrival in Navarre ex- 
cited immense enthusiasm among his adherents. 

The ravages of the cholera in Madrid, 1833-4, mali- 
ciously attributed to the poisoning of the wells by the 
monks, led to frightful massacres of these innocent per- 
sons, and showed the almost insane condition of public 
opinion; for the most intensely orthodox of Catholic 
nations had, in a paroxysm of terror and fury, turned 
upon the priests it had so long worshipped, and threat- 
ened to root out their very existence. The opening of 
the cortes gave rise to most unwelcome revelations as 
to the almost hopeless financial difficulties of the nation, 
— - enormous debts incurred, hundreds of millions de- 
ficit'; the marine in pitiable plight ; public instruction 
neglected ; the great highways between Saragossa and 
Barcelona, Seville and Madrid, and Madrid and Irun, 
bridgeless and incomplete ; and the government, with 
its one hundred and nineteen thousand soldiers, utterly 
unable to grapple with the Carlist rebellion. Wherever 
the eye glanced — dissolution of the forces of govern- 
ment, moral and financial bankruptcy, incapacity or 



668 Christina. 

impossibility of advancing a step; — fanaticism, bigotry, 
egoism rampant ; eternal opposition by grandees and 
deputies to whatever saving measures might be pro- 
posed ; and a whirl of giddy ministries, one succeeding 
and blinding the other with more an^i more desperate 
exhibitions of witlessness and weakness. 

The moral and tactical superiority of Zumalacarregui 
over Rodil, Mina, and the other Spanish generals, was 
strikingly shown in the rapid successes of the Carlists. 
A handful of soldiers breaking out into an emeute in 
the heart of the capital of Spain and the Indies 
plunged the peninsula into a state bordering on chaos. 
The complete demoralization of the royal army, the 
constant defeats of the C/iristinos, and the constant 
victories of Zumalacarregui, caused the government to 
call in the intervention of the allies ; but Louis Philippe 
declined to interfere. A momentary pause in the panic, 
caused by Zumalacarregui's intended march on Madrid, 
was produced by the wounding and death of the great 
general. 

A singular personality ; a stature of middle size ; a 
head of the finest symmetry, surmounting a neck wor- 
thy of a Roman gladiator; a profile that seemed snatched 
from some antique bas-relief, whose Greek harmony 
was, however, ruffled by something peculiarly aggres- 
sive in the chin and nose; a gray eye, working with 
incredible intensity under thick, overhanging brows ; a 
clear, passionate, and powerful energy imprisoned within 
an austere, monosyllabic, merciless nature ; inflexibly 
just, unselfish, inhuman ; his dazzling valor and the 
fascinating might of his personality wove a spell over 



Down with the Monk*! 671 

all who approached him ; and from his death dates the 
slow but sure decomposition of the Carlist party. 

General Maroto, a dark intriguer, whom Don Carlos 
called in to supply his place, proved the ruin of that 
party. 

" Down with the monks ! " became the almost uni- 
versal cry in 1835, anc ^ ^ ec ^ to sanguinary excesses in 
Catalonia and Navarre, — a flame ignited by incendiary 
pamphlets and consuming the land with anarchy. An- 
dalusia rose and demanded the constitution of 18 12 ; 
juntas established themselves everywhere, since the gov- 
ernment was powerless to govern ; again France, called 
in, declined to intervene in the affairs of the unhappy 
peninsula; and England, as a last resource from abso- 
lute ruin, at length proposed the formation of a minis- 
try under the great banker, Don Juan Alvarez y Men- 
dizabal. 

Beginning with a captivating programme for the finan- 
cial regeneration of the nation. Mendizabal's impracti- 
cable dreams could not be realized; his enigmatical 
financial projects for a moment fired the nation with 
enthusiastic faith in his wonder-working power, but 
soon brought him into discredit ; and the conflicts aris- 
ing between the central government and the numerous 
self-constituted juntas of the provinces increased the 
despair springing from a lost faith in the all-powerful 
minister. A new levy of one hundred thousand men, 
without a real to pay them, was made to check the dan- 
gerous monotony of Carlist successes in Aragon, Cata- 
lonia, and Vizcaya, as the new Carlist chiefs. Cabrera 
and Eguia, bade fair to make telling substitutes for 
Zumalacarregui against Espartero and General Cordoba. 



672 Christina. 

Mendizabal's decree, confiscating, with few exceptions, 
the entire mass of ecclesiastical property, opened for 
the moment a perspective of boundless resources for 
the creditors of the bankrupt state. But a nation so 
tormented by insecurity of life and property, so con- 
trolled by exasperating armed parties, and so devoured 
by forced loans, extraordinary taxes, open robbery, in- 
carceration, banishment, found even these immeasur- 
able church coffers insufficient ; and Mendizabal's 
decree passed away, leaving few traces except in the 
pockets of the speculators among the bourses of London, 
Paris, Madrid, and Cadiz. 

The general misery reached its culmination by the 
proclamation of the constitution of 1812 in Andalusia 
and Aragon, the solemn announcement of the " right 
of revolution " nearly everywhere, and the outbreak at 
San Ildefonso, the summer residence of the queen. An 
angry mob, breaking at midnight into the palace, terri- 
fied Christina into signing a decree recognizing the 
constitution of 18 12 until the will of the nation should 
be clearly known in cortes. The queen opened nego- 
tiations with her brother, Ferdinand II., king of Naples, 
with a view to fleeing the country and saving herself 
and her children from their intolerable position. Every- 
thing seemed rushing into the arms of Don Carlos, who 
in a few months might have been king of Spain, possi- 
bly with Isabella married to his eldest son, had not his 
utter stupidity, fanaticism, and incapacity rendered him 
incapable of utilizing the situation. At one time even 
negotiations were going on for the flight of the queen 
and the Infanta into the camp of Don Carlos, so hope- 
less did their cause at Madrid seem. Carlist bands 



A Netv Constitution. 673 

traversed Spain in all directions, and appeared before 
the gates of Madrid ; and if they had had any supreme 
commanding spirit, instead of numberless guerrilla 
leaders acting independently, at discord and dagger's 
point with each other, with the Virgin Mary as general- 
issima (!) and the pumpkin-headed " Charles V." telling 
his eternal beads, it is beyond a doubt that they would 
have succeeded. 

In 1837, a "revised" — though in reality perfectly 
new — form of the constitution of 1812 was accepted 
and sworn to by the cortes. This revision accepted 
the double chamber (" senate " and " chamber of dep- 
uties ") ; most of the attributions of the king ; the 
Catholic apostolic faith, — the abolition of whose exclu- 
sive claims was the first and last need of a liberal 
Spain ; election of one deputy, twenty-five years old, for 
each group of fifty thousand souls ; renewal of one- 
third of the senate whenever a new election took place ; 
and summoning, proroguing, and dissolution of cortes 
by the king. 

This was the third constitution introduced within 
twenty-five years, and after nine years of representa- 
tive government. 

Despite the brilliant achievements of Cabrera, — the 
barbarous murder of whose mother by the government, 
in retaliation for the son's cruelties, had raised a cry 
of indignation through Europe, — Espartero, since his 
appointment as commander-in-chief of the Spanish 
forces, inactive, negligent, and commonplace as he was, 
had gradually inflicted serious losses on the Carlists. 

Don Carlos himself, however, grovelling in the gross- 
est superstition, short-sighted, narrow-minded, and sur- 



674 Christina. 

rounded by a host of darklings and speculators, was 
his own greatest enemy; and the appointment of Gen- 
eral Maroto to the chief command, to relieve the feeble 
Guergue, sealed his doom. Bitter antagonisms soon 
showed themselves between Maroto and the "Apostol- 
ical " reactionaries that swarmed about Carlos. Carlos 
himself took sides against his commander-in-chief ; but 
the rebellion of the latter, menacing ruin to the cause, 
compelled the king to submit to his dictation. Maroto, 
overcome with disgust at the Carlist tactics, and prob- 
ably influenced by Espartero's increasing success, en- 
tered into negotiations, and concluded with him the 
well-known Treaty of Vergara, in 1839, which virtually 
ended the seven years' war. Don Carlos passed over 
to France with eight thousand of his followers ; many of 
his troops took service for Isabella II. ; and the flight 
of Cabrera over the border, in July, 1840, with five 
thousand troops, before the victorious legions of Es- 
partero, ended the first episode of this fifty years' war. 

The Carlist defeat was followed by the exhaustion, if 
not annihilation, of the powers which had been con- 
tending so desperately against the new order of things ; 
a victory due not so much to the vigor of the liberal 
party, which had been continually ravaged by self- 
conflict, as to the dissensions and lawlessness of the 
Carlists. 

Two of the liberal parties, — Exaltados and Moderados, 
— not content with fighting to the death the " legitimist 
absolutism " of Carlos, had, after crushing the third 
faction, called Progressists, themselves split into various 
factions ; and first one party and then the other, of the 
great liberal wing, governed the country by means of 



The Changes Profitless. 



675 



ministries without fixed principles and absolutely "stand- 
ing in the air." 

A period of repose, after the happily ended civil war, 
was indispensable, if any vital assimilation of the polit- 
ical forms recently given to the country was to take 
place. And . yet both constitution and liberal institu- 




tions had remained strange to the masses, for nearly all 
the political changes which the land had undergone 
since 1834 had been forced on it by revolutionary vio- 
lence, court intrigue, or the arbitrary will of powerful 
generals; and all these changes had been sterile for 
the real weal of the land. The great question agitating 



676 Christina. 

the country was, not this or that constitution, but " who 
has control of the offices and revenues of the state, 
and how can /and my relations find access to them?" 
"Whether Moderados or Progressists ruled, therefore, 
was a matter of indifference. 

After the treaty of Vergara, Espartero was the most 
popular and powerful man in Spain. He allied himself 
with the Progressist group against the queen-regent and 
her ministry, and soon had the authority of the state 
entirely at his beck. A crisis having arisen between 
Espartero and the regent soon after the opening of 
cortes in 1840, in consequence of the alleged refusal of 
the regent to sanction the law relating to the comuni- 
dudes, Christina, who was then in Barcelona with her 
daughters, laid down the regency, went into banish- 
ment, and left her children in Spain. Espartero, a 
man of moderate intelligence and no specially clear 
insight, now (1841) stood at the head of the govern- 
ment as regent. Dissensions burst forth in 1842; a 
rumor of a treaty with England disadvantageous to the 
commerce of Catalonia — the great commercial and 
manufacturing centre of Spain — roused both power- 
less republicans and Catholic absolutists against him. 
The order to bombard Barcelona and reduce the rebel- 
lious city to order, and the prorogation of parliament 
by him before supplies were voted, consummated the 
ruin of his popularity; and in July he took refuge on 
an English ship, rather than face the storm of an angry 
cortes. After Espartero's fall, Lopez, the eloquent 
president of the congress, was placed at the head of a 
provisional government, though a few months' incum- 




~',/ !: -' , 



11 l ; 
fill I- 



liiliiiikiiiiiNiS 1 



ill 1 



Christina. 679 

bency of office reduced him to hopelessness of ever 
doing anything for the country in what he called " that 
mephitic atmosphere in which thought and soul every 
moment sank in the wretchedness of personal interests, 
pretensions, and intrigues." 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 
ISABELLA II. 

ONLY twice since the death of Charles III. has 
Spain enjoyed a rule which, in permanency and 
relative comprehension of the needs of the country, 
really promoted its welfare. The first, under General 
Narvaez, the military head of the Moderados, main- 
tained itself, with various interruptions and changes, 
from 1844 to 185 1 ; the second, under General O'Don- 
nell, persisted — something- unknown in constitutional 
Spain — from 1858 to 1863. Though both bore a reac- 
tionary character, were conducted and supported by 
successful soldiers, and rested on a violent suppression 
of revolutionary tendencies, yet both held in check the 
excessive absolutist hankerings of court and clergy, 
checked by the revolution of 1854. But both eventu- 
ally succumbed to the hostility of these double influ- 
ences. As Don Carlos was no longer in the way, the 
exiled Christina and her emigrant party began to occupy 
more and more the position abandoned by him ; a posi- 
tion defended, not with the coarse fanaticism, the stupid 
thoughtlessness, of 1814 and 1823, but with elaborate 
argumentation, through the agency of skilful writers 
like Cortes and Valines. Narvaez's brilliant beginning, 
ready as he was to give strong guarantees of a conserva- 

680 



Reform made Practicable. 



681 



tivc policy, soon shattered against the clamors of the 
conservatives, not only for the limitation, but for the 
extinction of freedom, and the restoration of clerical 
power and possessions, — hierarchical pretensions which 







found the most zealous support in Christina. Under 
Narvaez, however, for the first time, some of the reforms 
instituted by the enlightened Burgos were made prac- 
ticable : a tolerably regular vote of supplies was ob' 



fi$'2 Xarvaez. 

tained ; the means for carrying on the government flowed 
in through the reformed system of taxation ; the sim- 
plest elements of human and political order appeared 
above the horizon; an intelligent scheme of instruction 
was organized; the state began to pay soldiers and 
officials punctually; security of life, means of inter- 
course and culture were afforded ; the people began to 
work, learn, and obey the laws ; and though temporarily 
agitated, in 1846, by the marriage of Don Francisco de 
Bourbon with Isabella II. (prematurely pronounced of 
age in 1843), and by the new scandals attaching to 
the queen and the queen-mother, the country, thanks to 
his vigorous and conciliatory policy, passed happily 
through the crisis of 1848. The reconciliation of par- 
ties was joyfully concluded by the general amnesty of 
1849, and the reform of the tariff completed the eco- 
nomic legislation of 1845. Passion exhausted itself 
little by little. Railroads, highways, manufactories 
began to spring up on all sides ; the loss of the col- 
onies began to be abundantly compensated by encour- 
agement of home industries. Unfortunately, the vicious 
court opened the palace doors wide to ecclesiastical 
influences. Narvaez. in 185 1, succumbed to the machi- 
nations of the growing Catholic absolutist party. Three 
years' experimenting with dreams of a restoration, of 
the genuine Habsburg-Bourbon type, interrupting the 
quiet and thriving work of the Moderado party, and 
again rousing the ancient strife, resulted in the revolu- 
tion of 1854. For the first time both the monarchy 
and Catholicism were openly and directly attacked. 
The scandalous acts of the court had brought into the 




LIBRAK\ 



O'Donnell 685 

open light a consistent, radical, republican, materialistic 
party, hitherto sneaking in corners. 

Espartero and O'Donnell humbled the throne in this 
revolution, and the former, as president of the ministry, 
showed his political incapacity, in the cortes of 1854-56, 
as conspicuously as before. The Progressists, now in 
power, showed the same impractical declamation, pas- 
sionateness, and bad temper as in 1840-43. Yet these 
years of commotion show an encouraging progress over 
those of earlier decades : the deportment of the people 
was more orderly, civilized, and human. The wild bar- 
barism of the civil war was almost unheard of, and the 
masses, once so susceptible to deeds of horror when 
urged by demagogues or monks, had grown quieter 
and more law-abiding. Twenty years' freedom from 
monasticism, and contact, however superficial, with 
modern culture, showed themselves plainly enough in 
these two years; and the revolution of 1856, collapsing 
as it did through its own impotence and the impotence 
of its leaders, held down by O'Donnell, who had kept 
Espartero in check as war minister, did not give rise to 
the hitherto usual acts of fanatical violence. 

But for the clerical tendencies of the priest-ridden 
court, O'Donnell might have maintained his intelligent, 
conciliatory policy directly after the putting down of 
the revolution. Narvaez's government, in 1856, shat- 
tered against the general opposition flashing forth at 
the efforts of the Romish hierarchy. In 1858 the 
queen again took refuge in O'Donnell, the " rebel 
chief," who, in the revolution of 1854, had occupied a 
middle position between the old parties of the Mode- 
rados and Progressists, and had formed out of the 



686 Isabella II. 

adherents of both the well-known Liberal Union. The 
object of the Union was to exclude party doctrines and 
party passions, combine the vigorous liberal powers of 
every shade, and place them at the disposal of real 
progress, order, and law. By means of this organiza- 
tion O'Donnell commanded the situation nearly five 
years, an important factor in which was his conduct of 
the brief but glorious Morocco war of 1859, called 
forth by Mahometan fanaticism and by unauthorized 
attacks on the Spanish-African stronghold of Ceuta. 
The happy effects of this outpouring of fervor on a 
foreign enemy were seen at once in the silencing of the 
eternal partisan squabbles, and the inauguration of a 
period of prosperity unknown hitherto to the exhausted 
peninsula. For several years it seemed as if at length 
the conclusion of the perpetual confusion in which 
Spanish life and progress had been involved had been 
reached, — as if law and culture had become indispens- 
able, as if progress in peaceful development and serene 
intelligence at length had become a fundamental part 
of peninsular experience. Foreign capital began to 
flow in, railways and manifold industrial enterprises to 
flourish. Exhaustive statistics began to show the world 
a really delightful advance in trade and commerce, 
population, national possessions, agriculture, and edu- 
cational facilities, the growth of the fleet and modes of 
communication, and the gradual passing away of the 
stifling superstition, laziness, and despotism of the past. 
The beginning of the year i860, as compared with 
the end of the reign of Ferdinand VII. in 1833, showed 
immense advances in public and private life. In 1833, 
the boundless tyranny of an evil-minded prince ; in 




THE NAVAJA. 



Beneficent Changes. 689 

i860 the evil passions of a frivolous princess curbed 
and chastised. Then the enormous influence of an 
infinitely wealthy, uncivilized clergy ; now this influence, 
emasculated by the sale of the church property, the 
abolition of nearly all the monasteries, the emancipa- 
tion of the state and of intellectual life from the church. 
Then the beneficent activity of the state, crippled 
despite the best will of the ruling circles by a pitiable 
organization of the executive and judiciary ; now courts 
and administration so constituted as to satisfy the needs 
of the moment wherever a tolerable desire to do justice 
was present. Then anarchy organized in the bands of 
so-called "royal volunteers," assisted by a feeble army 
and a powerless police ; now public authority and order, 
protected by a good army and an excellent police. 
Then agriculture, the professions, trade, perfectly pros- 
trate and destitute of the most necessary foundations ; 
now agriculture revived by private ownership of the 
huge property of the church, trade, and industry, by the 
building of railways, roads, bridges, and the existence 
of public security. Then all participation of the nation 
in affairs excluded — no representation, no accounta 
bility ; now the people able to make their will felt in 
Cortes, in provincial and communal representation, and 
in an educated press. Then Spain almost absolutely 
shut out from the civilized world ; now Spain touched 
at a thousand points — by means of travel, electricity, 
and steam — by the thronging impressions of trans- 
Pyreneean activity. Then all channels of education 
stopped up ; no public schools ; caricatures of middle- 
class schools and universities ; no literature ; no energy 
displayed by literary corporations : now all these chan- 



690 Isabella II 

nels overflowingly opened, the former hindrances to art 
set aside, the country covered with universities, lyceums, 
elementary schools, academies, libraries, museums. 

How then did it happen that in spite of all these 
beneficent changes, the nation still found no satisfac- 
tion — that O'Donnell could not maintain his policy, 
adapted on the whole to the circumstances ; that after 
his retirement in 1863 the ancient chaos of cabinet 
changes and dissolutions of Cortes, of arbitrary and 
violent repression and of prominciamientos burst forth 
more malignly than ever, and in five years precipitated 
the land into overthrowing the Bourbon dynasty in a day, 
and into a destruction of all the arrangements hitherto 
so painfully arrived at, leaving behind six years of the 
most ghastly anarchy ? 

The old Catholic Spain was extinct ; all external ob- 
stacles which might have counteracted a hopeful devel- 
opment removed ; constitutionalism in form at least ex- 
isted ; no ministry was able to resist a hostile majority 
in the cortes ; the press exercised a great influence. 
And yet the whole constitutional apparatus was hollow 
and empty. Constitutional monarchy is the most per- 
fect, but the most difficult of all forms of government. 
It pre-supposes with princes and citizens, not only 
judgment, but especially virtue ; is adapted only to a 
grave, carefully educated, morally convinced, healthful 
and energetic state, and a kingly house schooled in 
governing conscientiously. Where either is wanting — 
people or prince — great good fortune alone can render 
a tolerable issue practicable. Spain lacked both. An 
industrious, virtuously-trained, serious-minded people 
did not exist ; and at the palace, a princess whose scan- 



The True {Spaniard. 691 

dalous improprieties rivalled those of Maria Louisa, 
governed. In such circumstances, constitutional gov- 
ernment is perhaps the worst of governments. A people 
like the Spanish, accustomed for centuries alternately 
to riot and then to starve off the unproductiveness of 
a gigantic colonial system, overshadowed by a heathen- 
ized and fantastic church devoid of all sense of duty, 
were gravely endangered at the opening of a parlia- 
mentary era. All the conspicuous intelligences of the 
kingdom rushed eloquently and impetuously to the field 
of battle, not only to obtain influence and control, but 
the means of a luxurious existence. The true Spaniard 
knows little of the sober, modest average of a well-reg- 
ulated civil life ; he must live and labor as a great lord. 
Hence his effort to find, in the state, a substitute for 
the vanished colonies. Governing was to him synony- 
mous with plundering. The treasury became not only 
the salary-payer but the never-to-be-exhausted mine of 
thousands. Hence the pressure of all talent into the 
career of politics. Whatever in other lands thronged 
the counters and banking-houses, the fields, workshops, 
and lecture-rooms, the domains of art and science, 
rushed wildly here into the narrow vortex of politics, 
creating a crushing competition, a desperate struggle 
for existence, a superabundance of blood in the brain, 
with famished extremities. No politics and no party 
can satisfy claims so insatiable. Even though one 
party should possess itself exclusively of all the offices 
and remunerative positions, a great number of its own 
party and party leaders remains empty handed. These 
unfortunates then turn their backs on their ungrateful 
friends, and go into opposition or wherever else the 



692 Isabella II 

best prospects are to be found. A Spanish politician 
of 1865 said, that politics in Spain was a speculation, 
and the number of speculators was daily increasing. 

Such a condition of things as this described, spring- 
ing from social and economic considerations, was ren- 
dered worse by the national temperament. "The 
Spaniards act in violent paroxysms, one moment capa- 
ble of the noblest sacrifices, the most heroic exertions; 
then lapsing into inconstancy and helplessness \ a peo- 
ple of soldiers ; a race of heroes, but not a nation of 
citizens." Of course such a temperament puts the 
most serious obstacles in the way of self-government. 
Such a people needs politically the check of a strong, 
conscientious, respected monarchy ; morally it needs 
the guiding principle of a clearly developed sense of 
duty. Spain, unhappily, has had to bear through all the 
storms of this century, the load of a dynasty whose 
immorality and entire unconsciousness of duty would 
have brought the healthiest nation into agony. Imagine 
a century of George the Fourths ! — Spain is more des- 
titute of the moral foundation than perhaps any other 
European nation. The real question of her future, 
therefore, is intimately allied with that of a restora- 
tion of her moral and intellectual groundwork. The 
whole soul of the people rested on Catholicism at the 
outbreak of the revolution ; its sinister arch spanned 
the whole moral horizon and intelligence of the people. 
At the head of the movement of 1808, Catholicism 
soon fell into passionate conflict with that movement ; 
and that the latter was so savage in its character, so 
deeply undermining in its effects upon the people, w r as 
essentially its fault. The restorations of 18 14 and 



A Royal Collapse. 693 

1823 rendered a reposeful development impossible, — 
destroyed the faith and trust of the people in its guides. 
The passions thus developed drove the constitutional 
beginnings, after the death of Ferdinand, astray. The 
burning of monasteries and murder of monks, illumin- 
ated, by a flash from hell, its process of education for 
the people. Its guidance of Carlist politics showed a 
mastery in the art of ruining those entrusted to its care. 
Catholicism, having brought Don Carlos to taste the 
bitter cup of exile, passed over to the other camp. 
Essentially due to it were the hindrances which Nar- 
vaez's intelligent conservative policy, experienced in the 
"forties ;" the revolution of 1854, again, was due to its 
blind pressure after a thorough-going Catholic restora- 
tion. Queen Isabella followed its whisperings when she 
constantly meddled with O'Donnell's policy, and its 
advice, when in the last years of her government she 
put herself in such opposition to the minister that the 
breach ensuing plunged her and her whole house into 
Instant misery and banishment. Catholicism had 
wrecked the House of Habsburg ; it consummated its 
triumph by wrecking the House of Bourbon. When, in 
September, 1868, the land, almost with unanimity, let 
the royal house collapse under the measureless mass of 
its own iniquities, its indignation was less bitter against 
Isabella than against her spiritual advisers. The world 
was astounded to see how far the most Catholic of na- 
tions had loosed itself from its church. Out of hatred 
to this church the populations of the great cities actu- 
ally began to look sympathetically on the advent of 
Protestantism in Spain. Heart and understanding had 
become equally estranged from the previously accepted 



694 Isabella II. 

dogmatic faith. Sixty years of uninterrupted, immoral, 
and illiberal, spiritual tyranny, poisoning the whole 
period, frustrating all the hopes of the nation, had at 
last ended in the bursting of a chain which for nearly 
two thousand years had bound church and people 
together. 

But with Catholicism, the firm foundation on which 
the Catholic nation rested is knocked away. No peo- 
ple, least of all the profoundly religious Spanish people, 
can exist without some strong moral basis. So much 
passion, fancy, extravagance, withdraws the intellectual 
life of the peninsula from the power of quiet philo- 
sophic meditation, its moral life from sober, moral 
guidance. Hence the chaos of the next six years. 
Unbridled haste, the traces of a nervous, paroxysmal 
constitution, the play and counterplay of splendid, but 
immature talent, convulsive heroism, followed closely 
by wretched depression, brief moments of great exal- 
tation, and long years of ensuing enervation, endless 
propositions resulting in nothing, and impracticable 
reveries put forth by the scholar and statesman ; all 
come out luminously and sorrowfully enough in Spanish 
literature, art, and life. Such is the picture of this 
richly-gifted people of noble tendencies, whom to know 
is to love and pitv, whose fate it has been to be incon- 
ceivably misled and misguided by the very persons who 
should have guided and helped it. 

The act which led to the immediate exile of Isabella, 
then enjoying the sea baths of San Sebastian, was the 
Prommciamieiito of Cadiz, of September 19, 1868, which 
bares to the quick the unendurable misery and dread of 
the country; fundamental laws trampled under foot; 



A Provisional G-ovemment. 695 

the right to vote perverted by intimidation and bribery ; 
personal security, dependent not on the laws but on the 
irresponsible will of haphazard magistrates ; communal 
freedom extinct ; the executive and the exchequer a 
prey to vice and brokerage ; public instruction enslaved ; 
the press mute ; patents of nobility shamelessly lavished 
on favorites ■ universal corruption throughout the ad- 
ministration. It was a cry which rang from one end 
of Europe to the other, a frightful awakening to Isa- 
bella and Father Claret. The signers of the Pronun- 
ciai?iiento were, Duke de la Torre, Juan Prim (since the 
Morocco and Mexican wars the great rival of O'Don- 
nell), General Dulce, Francisco Serrano Bedoya, Ra- 
mon Nouvilas. R. Perimo de Rivera, A. Caballero de 
Rodas, and Juan Topete, — all men of unbounded influ- 
ence. A provisional government was formed, — after 
some slight hostilities between the royal and the revo- 
lutionary troops at Alcolea, — with Serrano, as president 
of the ministry, Prim, as war minister, Lorenzana, as 
foreign secretary, Ortiz, minister of justice, Topete, 
minister of the marine, Figuerola, finance minister, 
Sagasta, minister of the interior, Zorilla, minister of 
commerce, and Lopez de Ayala for the colonies. 

In 1869, the national cortes was convoked for the 
purpose of establishing a permanent form of govern- 
ment, the opening of which was saluted by vociferous 
cries of " Constitutional Monarchy ! " " Democratic 
Monarchy ! " " The Republic ! " " The Federal Re- 
public ! " The Bourbon coat of arms was removed from 
the hall of parliament, and the crucifix vanished from 
the president's table. Serrano laid down his deputed 
authority in February, 1869. A committee of fifteen, 



696 



Serrano. 



from whom the republican deputies were excluded, was 
assigned the work of drawing up a constitution. The 
restoration of a monarchical form of government, with 
constitutional guarantees, was a clearly enunciated point 
of this constitution. It established freedom of con- 
science, the principle that all sovereignty flowed from 




MONTPENSIER, SERRANO, TOPETE. 

the people, monarchy as the form of government (in op- 
position to two hundred republican journals and five 
hundred republican committees), a senate and council 
of state, and many other special determinations. It 
was signed on the 2d of June : magnificent inkstands, 



Prince Leopold Withdrawn. 697 

prettily ornamented parchments, pens on silver waiters, 
and gold and ivory pen-holders set with brilliants, — one 
of the deputies had proposed eight great eagle-quills ! 
— were supplied for subscribing to this mosaic work of 
Democrats, Progressists, and Unionists. The public 
celebration attending its solemn promulgation was with- 
out enthusiasm. 

Marshal Serrano was named regent for the interreg- 
num, during which the candidacies of the duke of 
Montpensier, Isabella's brother-in-law, and Don Fer- 
nando, king of Portugal, the unwilling representative of 
the so-called party of the " Iberian Union," were dis- 
cussed and rejected, the first for dynastic considera- 
tions, the other because of Don Fernando's repugnance 
to attempting union between Spain and Portugal. 
Prim's candidate, Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern, the 
proximate occasion of the Franco-German war, was 
bitterly opposed by Napoleon III., the empress, and 
Rouher, president of the ministry, from a dread, it is 
said, of a re-establishment of the universal monarchy 
of Charles V. There were rumors, too, that the em- 
press's antipathy to the Hohenzollern family, originating 
from their rejecting a certain marriage alliance proposed 
by her, was one of the causes of the war. It is im- 
possible here to enter into Napoleon's criminal obsti- 
nacy in insisting that the king of Prussia, as the eldest 
of the Hohenzollern branch, should formally forbid 
Prince Leopold to persist in his candidacy. King 
William declined such a concession to French pique. 

The prince's father, however, in view of possible com- 
plications and the angry feelings of France, withdrew 
his name in July, 1870. The friends of Espartero in- 



698 



Amadeo. 



sisted that the crown should be offered to him, the " old 
hermit of Logrofio ; " but he stubbornly and wisely 
refused. 

The duke of Aosta, Don Amadeo, son of Victor Eman- 
uel, then received (November 16) one hundred and 
ninetv-one out of three hundred and eleven votes of 




Ruiz Zorrilla, Prim, Sagasta. 

the cortes, Montpensier twenty-seven, his duchess one, 
Espartero eight, Don Alfonso (son of Isabella), two, 
the Federal Republic sixty, the simple Republic one. 
The duke of Aosta was declared elected Constitutional 
King of Spain, under the title of Amadeo I. 

The assassination of Marshal Prim (December 27-30), 
just before Amadeo's arrival, filled the country and the 



Prim Assassinated. . 699 

high-hearted Savoyard king with gloom. "I am dying, 
but the king is coming. Long live the king S " were the 
soldier's last words. 

Serrano surrendered his powers to the cortes and the 
king was duly sworn in, January 2, 187 1. 

On the nth of February, 1873, Amadeo abdicated, 
and the " Republic succeeded the monarchy as quietly 
as one sentinel succeeds another." The Italian king had 
found it impossible to govern constitutionally in Spain ; 
his life had been attempted ; the queen was continu- 
ally insulted by the wives of the grandees ; one disso- 
lution of parliament, and one change of cabinet after 
another, had failed to give him elements homogeneous, 
enlightened, unselfish, and patriotic enough to control a 
country in which republicanism had now made mon- 
strous strides. " Spain for the Spaniards ! Out with 
the Savoyard ! " resounded through stranger-abhorring 
Spain. A king in round hat and white pantaloons, 
simple in manners, intolerant of hand-kissing and ob- 
sequiousness ; a queen who dared to give birth to a 
prince without having the palace illuminated ; an im- 
passive, unemotional royal couple, promenading almost 
unattended through the streets of Madrid ; matchless 
courage and simplicity ; the heartiest desire to benefit 
the country by parliamentary and lawful methods, to heal 
its incurable wounds, to reconcile its irreconcilable par- 
ties, — all these things contributed to the departure of 
the king and queen to Portugal. 

The Federal Republic was proclaimed by two hun- 
dred and fifty-eight votes of the cortes against thirty- 
two. The " fuera los Borbones ! " of 1868, was suc- 
ceeded by the " al fin lo hemos logrado ! " (at last we 



700 



The Rrpubh 



have it !) of the Republic of 1873. Two years of dictator- 
ships now ensued ; a cruel picture over which it is 
refreshing to draw the veil. The beginning of republi- 
can institutions was, however, signalized by the negotia- 
tion of an important loan at twelve per cent., whereas, 
the monarchy had been forced to pay twenty to twenty- 
five per cent. The war in Cuba — begun in 1868 by the 
shameful excesses of the mother country, the tyranny of 
the irresponsible captains-general, the refusal of the 
home government to liberate the slaves, and to grant 
Cuba, after repeated promises lasting from 1820 to 1868, 




Pi y Margall. 



Castelar. 



representation in the national cortes — still raged furi- 
ously, and was not to be extinguished till 1878. A 
new Carlist war also had broken out in the North. 

On June 11, 1873, Senor Pi y Margall, a respectable 
archaeologist, jurist, journalist, political economist, and 
follower of Proudhon, was elected " president of the 



Emilio Castelar. 701 

executive power," but resigned in five weeks, unable to 
cope with the civil war breaking out all over the penin- 
sula. Nicolas Salmeron, an adherent of the conserva- 
tive republican party, called the "brain of the revolu- 
tion," a popular and accomplished university professor, 
distinguished for his clear and comprehensive policy as 
dictator, held power for a few weeks, and was followed 
by the great orator and parliamentarian, Emilio Castelar, 
(born at Cadiz in 1831). The Virginius affair, during 
his administration, — -the seizure of an American ship 
bearing supplies to the Cuban insurgents, and the shoot- 
ing of many of her crew and officers, — came near in- 
volving the United States in conflict with Spain ; but 
was satisfactorily adjusted by concessions on the part of 
Spain. Castelar's government — powerless likewise 
to grapple with the increasing anarchy, the deeds of 
violence everywhere, the Carlist and Cuban wars, the 
innumerable republics and bits of republics that had 
proclaimed themselves in the provinces, the financial 
and foreign difficulties — was ended by a coup d'etat 
early in January, 1874, led by General Pavia and his 
soldiers, to " prevent the triumph of anarchy." Serrano 
was again entrusted with the presidency of the execu- 
tive power, and, a reaction from the chaotic and inco- 
herent republicanism of a nation totally unfit for it hav- 
ing taken place, on December 31, 1874, Don Alfonso 
(born November 28, 1857), eldest son of Isabella II, — 
a thoroughly educated young prince, brought up far 
from his ignoble mother, in England, France, and Aus- 
tria, — was proclaimed king at Madrid. He landed at 
Barcelona and assumed the government January 9, 1875. 
He has been twice married; (1) to his cousin, Marie de 



702 . Alfonso XII. 

las Mercedes, youngest daughter of the duke of Mont- 
pensier ; (2) to Marie Christina, archduchess of Aus- 
tria. 

Under him Spain enjoys an hereditary, constitutional 
monarchy. The king is inviolable ; the executive rests 
in him, the legislative power in king and cortes. Sen- 
ate and congress compose the cortes, and their meet- 
ings are annual. Deputies from Cuba were admitted in 
1878. The king convokes, suspends, or dissolves 
cortes, appoints the president and vice-president of the 
senate from the senate alone, and has responsible min- 
isters. Local self-government is allowed to the various 
provinces, districts, and communes, with which neither 
executive nor cortes can interfere except in cases of ar- 
bitrary or unconstitutional assumption. The established 
religion is Catholic, which is maintained by the state, 
and a limited freedom of worship is allowed to Protes- 
tants, though it must be private. 



KINGS OF SPAIN 
SINCE THE UNION OF CASTILE AND ARAGON 



HOUSE OF ARAGON. 

Ferdinand V., The Catholic . 1512 

HOUSE OF HABSBURG. 

Charles I. (accession) 1516 

Philip II " 1556 

Philip III. ........ u 1598 

Philip IV " 1621 

Charles II. ...... " 1665 

HOUSE OF BOURBOX. 

Philip V " 1700 

Ferdinand VI. " 1746 

Charles III. ...... " 1759 

Charles IV " 1788 

Ferdinand VII. ...... " 1808 

HOUSE OF BONAPARTE. 
Joseph Bonaparte ...... . 1808 

HOUSE OF BOURBON [Restored). 

Ferdinand VII 1814 

Isabella II. (accession) 1833 

703 



704 Kings of Spain. 

REPUBLIC. 

Provisional Government . . . . , 186S 

Regency of Serrano ....... 1869 

HOUSE OF SAVOY. 
Amadeo I. ......... 1871-73 

REPUBLIC. 

Dictatorship 1873 

(1) Pi y Margall, 

(2) Salmeron, 

(3) Castelar, 

(4) Serrano .... After coup d'etat of 1874 

» HOUSE OF BOURBON {Restored), 
Alfonso XII. ........ Jan., 1875 



INDEX. 



PAGE 

Abdallah, 81 

Abdallah-ibn-Tonmert, . .188 
Abderaman I., the Slav, 
founder of the Omai- 
yade dynasty, . . . 69, 71 

execrated, 72 

Abderaman III., .... S3 
Abdication of Charles V., . 444 

of Charles IV., .... 630 

of Philip V., 592 

Abencerrages, family of, . 
"Abjuration," act of, . . 
Abul Hacen at Granada, . 
Adrianople, battle of, . . 
Agriculture in Aragon, . . 

in Peru, 

progress of, 

Aix-la-Chapelle, treaty of, 

560 
Alaric the " Balth," . . 21 
Albert of Brandenburg kin- 
dles war in Germany, 
Alcala, burning of the libra 

ry at, . . . 
Alcala, university of 
Alcantara, order of, 
Alarcos, battle of, . 
Alexander Farnese, 
Alfonso II., .... 14S, 
Alfonso the Cathulic, 141, 



281 
520 

277 

18 

230 

403 
130 

594 



445 

33° 
349 
267 
197 
5 J 9 
149 
142 



PAGE 

Alfonso, Don, proclaimed 

king, 701 

Alfonso the Fighter, . . .190 

Alfonso X. (the Learned), 206 

Alhama, capture of, . . . 282 

Alicante, bombardment of, 564 

Almansor, power of, . . . 90 

Almohades, the, .... 188 

Almoravide conquest, the . 115 

dynasty, knell of the, . . 188 

Alva, Duke of, character of, 510 

sent to the Netherlands, . 479 

Granvelle, and William 

of Orange, 460 

rule in the Netherlands 

ends, 509 

Alvaro de Luna . . 235, 253 

Amadeo, duke of Aosto, . 698 

abdication of, .... 699 

Amazon, Orellana on the . 405 
America, desires of Isabella 

concerning, .... 344 

discovered, 367 

Amiens, peace of, . . . . 620 

Andalusia, loveliness of, . 272 

war in, 276 

Anne of Austria, queen of 

Philip II., 509 

Antwerp, the cathedral at- 
tacked, 476 

705 



706 



Index. 



PAGE 

Antilles, discovery of, . . 370 
Arabian character, ... 99 
Arabian Nights, the, . . .101 
Arabic language, laws against 

its use, . . . . 488, 493 
Arabs and Berbers distin- 
guished, 54 

Aragon, development of, . 209 

feudalism in, 226 

institutions of, 244, 245, 248 
originally small, . . .164 

power of, 245 

rise of, 165 

Architecture, the, of Spain, 

120, 121, 124 
Aristocracy, the, of Spain, 503 
Armada, the invincible, 524, 527 

Astrolabe, the, 358 

Asturian kings, last of, . .152 
Athanaric fights the Huns, 17 
Attila, the Hun, .... 27 
Augsburg Confession, the, . 431 
Augsburg, Philip II. at, . 457 

Recess of 444 

Authorship in the Roman 

period, xl 

Austria, decline of " star " 

of, 443 

Averroes, Avicenna, and 

other Aristotelians, . 112 

Ayxa the Chaste, .... 281 

Aztec community, the, . . 381 

hieroglyphics, .... 386 

manners, 388 

Badajoz, siege of, by Souit, 644 
Bagdad founded, . . . .118 
Barbara, queen, death of, . 596 



PAGE 

Barbary pirates, enterprise 

against, 431 

Barcelona, bombardment of, 676 

fall of, 588 

last of the counts of, . . 235 

province of, ] 58 

Basel, peace of, .... 613 
Basques, the, at war, . . .163 

the, 655, 657 

Battles, great, 185 

Bayonne, deputies called to, 636 
Behem, Martin, inventor of 

the astrolabe, . . . .358 
Berber dominion narrowed, 145 
Berbers, the, come into 

power, 52, 54 

Bernardo del Carpio, . .146 
Berry, Duchess of, becomes 

wife of Ferdinand VII., 650 
Bertrand du Guesclin, . .217 
Bigotry of Philip II., . . 469 
Blanche, legend of, . . .218 
Blenheim, battle of, . . . 588 
Blood, Council of, estab- 
lished, 480 

Bobadil at Granada, . . . 302 

flight of, 287 

takes Granada, .... 288 
Bobadil's mother, . . . .281 
Bolero, the dance, .... 493 
Bonaparte, Joseph, at Mad- 
rid, 637, 644 

Bonaparte, Napoleon, re- 
turns from Egypt, . .619 
Books collected by Hacem 

II., 86 

Bourbon, collapse of the 

house of, 693 



Index. 



707 



PAGE 

Bourbons and Habsburgs, 

pedigrees of 453 

Bourbons restored to the 

Spanish throne, . . . 645 

Buenos Ayres, capture of 

by England, .... 623 

Bull fighting, beginning of, 41 

Byzantine influence in archi- 
tecture, 122 

Byzantines expelled, ... 41 

Cabot, Sebastian, .... 36S 
Cadiz plundered by the 

English, 588 

sacked, 528 

siege of, raised, .... 644 
Caesar and Pompey, . . xxxii 
Calais relinquished by Eng- 
land, 460 

California, discovery of, . 391 
Calligraphy among the Ara- 
bians, 113 

Campomanes, . . . 583, 607 
Cambray, treaty of, . . . 430 
Cape Finisterre, battle of, . 621 
Cape St. Vincent, battle of, 614 
Cariist defeat, a, . . . . 674 

intrigues, 654 

successes, .... 668, 671 

war, the 652 

Carlos, Don, character of, . 673 
conspiracy against, . . . 482 
conspiracy by, .... 652 

death of, 486 

his influence among the 

Basques, 661 

Cartier, Jacques, in Buenos 

Ayres, 405 



PAGE 

Castelar, Emilio, ... 701 

Castile, administration of, . 261 
and Aragon, union of, . 537 
characteristics of, . . . 244 
feudalism in, . . . 222, 223 
originally called Bardulia, 167 
rises in greatness, . . .187 

Calatrava, order of, . . . 267 

Catalonia and Valencia, in- 
stitutions of, . . . .251 
climate of , . . . . - . xviii 
its union with Aragon, . 245 

people of, 157 

rebellion in, 557 

Cateau-Cambresis, treaty 

of, 460, 474 

Catharine of Aragon, birth 

of, 297 

Catholicism adopted, . 36, ^j 
attacked, 682 

Cervantes, 544 

at the battle of Lepanto, 498 

Character of the Spaniards, 240 

Charlemagne at Ronces- 

valles, 146 

besieges Saragossa, . . 71 

Charles II., of Spain, . . 563 

Charles III., of Spain, . . 579 
reign of, 596 

Charles IV., abdication of, . 630 
accession of, .... 604 

Charles V., abdication of, . 444 

baffled, 442 

birth of, 340 

crowned at Aix-la-Cha- 

pelle, 415 

enters Valladolid, . . .412 
his activity, 429 



708 



Index. 



PAGE 

Charles V., death of, . . . 452 

his ambition, 538 

his retirement, . . 444, 446 

his reverses, 436 

invades Italy, .... 423 

marriage of, 425 

popular among the Neth- 
erlander, 462 

sketch of, 445 

lands in the Asturias, . 411 
Charters, the, of Christian 

Spain, 194 

Chili, conquest of, ... 405 
Chivalry, institutions of, . 133 
Cholera in Madrid, . . . 667 
Christianity in Spain, . xxxv 
Christians plundered, . . 91 

war against, 133 

Church and state united, . 43 
Church, prosperity of the, 543 
Cid Campeador, the, 174, 177 
Cid, song of the, . . . .178 
Clement, Pope, retires to 

Castle St. Angelo, . . 426 
Clergy, unfaithfulness of, . 256 

Clovis, 29 

Coligny, Gaspard de, at St. 

Quentin, 459 

Colonial possessions, . xxiii 

Columbus, death of, . . . 372 

first voyage of, ... . 356 

last voyage of, and death, 345 

life of, 362 

treaty with, 312 

Compass and the astrolabe, 357 

" Compromise," the, . 470, 473 

Compostella, Santiago de, . 174 

shrine at, 149 



PAGE 

Complutensian polyglot, 

the > 349 

Commerce in Catalonia, . 230 
Constantine's rule in Spain, xxxv 
Constitution, a new (1837), 673 

the, of 1812, 643 

Cordova becomes a second 

Bagdad, 118 

condition of in the time 

of Abderaman III., . 85 
end of the kingdom of, . 97 

khalifate of, 138 

kingdom of, . . . 69, 137 
palace of Zahra at, . .120 
pillaged by the Berbers 
and Castilians, ... 94 
Cortes, Hernando, . . . 376 
Cortes, the first in Castile, 243 
Crespy, peace of, . . . . 436 
Crusaders capture Jerusa- 
lem, 186 

Cuba, war of, 700 

Culture of the Spaniards, . 240 
the golden age of, . . .104 

Debt, the national, . . . 586 
De Soto discovers the Mis- 
sissippi, 405 

Despotism of Philip II., . 502 

Drake, Sir Francis, . . . 524 

Dramatic art stimulated, . 545 



Ecclesiastical influence, . . 244 
reform, . . . 577, 578, 580 
Ecclesiastical tribunals, en- 
croachments of, . . 268 



Index, 



709 



Education under Charles 

III., 586 

Egmont accused by Marga- 
ret of Parma, .... 469 
against the Inquisition, 

473> 475 
arrested, ...... 479 

Elizabeth of England makes 
a treaty with the Neth- 
erlands, 515 

England, wars with, . . . 586 
Enrique IV., of Castile, 256, 257 
Epila, battle of, . . 225, 247 
Erwic supersedes Wamba, 48 
Escorial, factions in the, . 623 
the palace of the, . . . 507 
Espartcro, . . . . 671, 673 

fall of, 676 

popularity of, . . 676, 685 
Euric, brother of Theo- 

deric, 28 

Eusebius rebukes Sisibut 

for bull-fighting. . . .41 



Factions, 


674 


Fandango, the dance, . . 


493 


Ferdinand I., king of Leon 




and Castile, . . . 


172 


Ferdinand and Isabella, 


239 


conspiracy against, . . 


259 


births of, 


2 5 l 


marriage articles of, . . 


2 57 


Ferdinand, character of, 


355 


Ferdinand III., . . . . 


200 


Ferdinand VI., accession of, 


594 


progress in the reign of, . 


576 


Ferdinand VII., character 




of, 


651 



reign of, 

restored to the throne, 
three periods in his reign 

death of, 

Feudal system in Spain, 
Field of the Cloth of Gold 

the, 

Finances, condition of, . 
Financial troubles, . „ 
Finisterre, Cape, battle of, 
Fontainebleau, treaty of, 
Floridablanca, .... 
at the head of affairs, 
prime minister, . . . 
Francis I., character of, . 

taken prisoner at Pavia, 
France vanquished, . . 
French revolution, the, . 
Fueros (charters),". . . 
the, 



Galicia, shrine at, . . . 
Germany, disquiet in, 
Ghent, insurrection in, . 
Gibraltar, capture of, 
Godoy, Manuel, favorite of 
Maria Louisa, 

60S-610, 614, 622, 
an abject dependent, . . 
as generalissimo, . . . 
circumvented by Napo- 
leon, 

fall of, 

flies from Madrid, . . . 

hated, 

Goiden Fleece, knights of 
the, ....... 



PAGE 
63O 

645 
646 

6 53 
222 

4i5 
635 
667 
621 
623 
638 
584 
601 

438 
424 

460 
608 
194 
656 

149 

425 
435 



623 
616 

620 



631 



476 
333 



710 



Index. 



PAGE 

Gonzalez, Count Fernan, . 168 
Gothic kings, list of, . . . 53 
Government of the Oma- 

iyades, . . . . 133, 134 

Granada, Abul Hacen at, .277 

architecture of, . . . .124 

civil war in, 2S7 

fall of, 309 

kingdom of, 208 

Moors removed from, 492, 493 

siege of, 304 

Grand Alliance, demands 

of, rejected by Louis, . 591 
Granvelle in the Nether- 
lands, 468 

William of Orange, and 

Alva, 460 

Greece and Spain com- 
pared, xviii 

Greek settlements in Spain, 

xxvii 
Grimaldi, Marquis, minister 

of Charles III., . . . 599 
Guadalajara, Cortes of, . . 231 
Guadalete, battle of, . . .139 
Guerilla warfare, .... 661 
Guesclin, Bertrand du, . .217 
" Gueux," the, a party 

among the Protestants, 475 
Guilds, system of abolished, 662 

Habsburgers, decay under 

the rule of the, . 541, 549 
Habsburgs and Bourbons, 

pedigrees of, ... . 453 
Hacam II. collects books, . S6 
Hacam the Voluptuary, . j^ 
Hamilcar Barca in Spain, xxvii 



PAGE 

Hannibal, xxviii 

Hasdrubal, xxviii 

Henry II. of France aids 

Maurice of Saxony, . 441 
Henry VII., of England, 

treaty with, . . . . 3 rS 
Hermandad, reorganization 

of, . . • . . . . 262, 266 

the, of Castile, .... 243 

Hermenigild and Recared, . ^^ 

Hicham, 89, 95 

Hieroglyphics, the Aztec, . 3S6 
Holland allied to England, 522 
Holland and Zealand unit- 
ed' 513 

Holy League, formation of, 349 

the, formed, 497 

Huns, the, in Spain, . . 17, 27 



Iberian Union, the, . . 
Ibn-Hazin, the poet, . . 
Ildefonso, San, outbreak at 

palace of, 

treaty of 

Incas, conquest of the, . 

government of, . 
Inquisition, the, established 
in the Xetherlands, 

establishment of, . . . 

petition for its abolition 
in the Netherlands, . . 

the, in the Netherlands, . 

influence of the, . . . 

restraining of the, . '. . 

the, restrained, . . 578, 

the, resisted, .... 

the, verses on, 
Italy, civilization of, . . 



697 
96 
672 
594 
614 
39: 
393 

470 

270 

475 
46C 

546 
602 

579 
475 
5*° 
34i 



Index. 



711 



PAGE 

Italy, war for. . . . 317, 323 

Italian wars, . . 317, 323, 339 

Isabella, death of, . . 342, 343 
Isabella Farnese, wife of 

Philip V., . . . 562, 571 

Isabella of France, death of, 487 

Isabella II., .... 674, 693 

exile of, 694 

Islam, defined, 133 

Islamism hateful to the Ber- 
bers, 57 

James, St., of Compostella, 149 

Jayme I., 200, 202 

Jerusalem captured by the 

Crusaders, 186 

Jesuits, establishment of, . 435 
expelled from Spain, . . 580 
expulsion of, by Charles 

III, 600 

the, recalled, . . . . 646 
Jews, beginning of the per- 
secutions of, .... 40 

condition of, 61 

edict against, . . . 312, 313 

trouble from, 49 

Jovellanos, Gaspar Melchor 

de, 607, 636 

recalled. 616 

Juan, Don, character of, . 516 

death of, 516 

Juan, Don, of Austria, . . 491 
captain-general of the 
Netherlands, . . . .515 
Juan the Careless, relaxa- 
tion of morals under, . 232 
Junot, Marsha], in Portugal, 623 



PAGE 

Jurisprudence, the Visiguth- 

ic system, . . . . . 265 

Khalifate, dissolution of 

the, 95 

Kindaswint the Fiery, . . 44 

Koran, the, . . . . 124, 127 

Las Navas de Tolosa, bat- 
tle of, 199 

Law among the Visigoths, . 193 
Learning, state of, ... 60 
Leicester, Earl of, ... 523 
Leopold of Hohenzolleren, 697 
Lepanto, battle in the Gulf 

of, 500 

Lex Visigothorum, . . . 193 
" Liberal Union," the, . . 686 
Liberty, principles of un- 
derstood by the Castil- 

ians, . 422 

Lisbon, earthquake, . . . 595 

pillaged, 149 

Literature, Arabian, . . . 100 

in Peru, 403 

state of, . 82, 89, 102, 544 
Louis XVI. ancl^ Marie An- 
toinette, 601 

Louisiana sold to the Unit- 
ed States, 621 

treaty concerning, . . . 599 
Loyola establishes the or- 
der of Jesuits, . . . 435 
Lucena, capture of Bobadil 

at, 290, 295 

Luther at the Diet of 

Worms, 416 

death of, 437 



712 



Index. 



PAGE 

667 

xvii 
roi 



in th 



Madrid, cholera in, 
climate of, . . . 
Mahomet's success, 
Malaga, a defeat 
mountains of, . . 
siege of, . . . 
situation of, . 
Malplaquet, battle of, 
Malta ceded to the Knights 
of St. John, . . . 
Knights of St. John at, 

siege of, 

Manuscripts burned, . . 
Margaret of Parma, . . 
Maria Christina, duchess o 

Berry, 

Maria Louisa, death of, . 
Maria Louisa, princess of 
Parma, her vile influ- 
ence, 604, 607 

Mary of England, death of, 460 

marriage of, ... . 
Massena, Marshal, his ex 

pedition to Portugal, 
Mathematics among the 

Arabians, .... 
Maurice, death of, . . 
of Saxony, .... 
Medecine among the Ara 

bians, 

Melancthon draws up the 

Augsburg Confessioi 
Mendoza, Cardinal, . . 
Mexicans, religion of, 
MexicOj conquest of, . . 
foundation of the city of, 
the, of the Aztecs, . . . 
Mezquita, the, of Cordova, 



288 
301 
298 
59i 

481 
421 
480 

33° 
467 

651 
592 



458 

643 

109 

443 
441 



43 1 
327 
385 
39i 
382 

377 
119 



PAGE 

Military orders, .... 195 
Minorities of princes, the 
curse of mediaeval 

Spain, 156 

Misery, general, .... 672 
Mississippi, the, discov- 
ered, 405 

Monks, denunciation of the, 671 

Montezuma, .... 383, 384 

Montpensier, duke of. . . 697 

Moorish rebellion, . . . 4S7 

Moors, banishment of, . . 550 

of Granada, treatment of, 329 

removed from Granada, . 492 

subjugation of, . . . .271 

the, take up arms against 

Philip II., 491 

Moral aspect of Spain, . xviii 
Morals relaxed, .... 232 
Moslem decline, after the 

battle of Lepanto, . . 500 
Mountains of Spain, xviii, xix 
Mousa-ibn-Nocair, ... 61 
Muncer, the revolutionist 

of Thuringia, . . . .425 
Miihlberg, battle of, . . . 438 
Murat at Madrid, .... 631 
Music among the Arabians, no 

Naples, descent of the 

Turks on, 44^ 

partition of the kingdom 

of, 339 

Napoleon, popularity of, . 627 
pours troops into Spain, 

628, 629 
supreme in Europe, . . 622 



Index. 



718 



Narvaez, head of the " Mocl- 

crados," " 6So 

Navarre, hostilities in, . .421 
under Sancho the Great, 163 
Navigators, the Spanish, . 356 
Navy, the Spanish, decline 

of, • • • • 635 

Nero, xxxv 

Nestorian Christians influ- 
ence Arabian civiliza- 
tion, . . . . . , . in 
Netherlands, Alva sent to 

the, 479 

butchery in the, .... 5:9 
Charles V. and Philip in 

the, . 44 r 

description of, ... 461 
independence of acknowl- 
edged, 550 

Inquisition established 

in, . 470 

Inquisition in, . . . . 466 
peace with, • - .. . , 559 
petition for the abolition 

of the Inquisition, . . 47 5 
Philip II. visits, . . 457 

Philip's policy towards, . 469 

Protestant, 465 

the, overrun by France, . 558 
the, resigned to Philip, . 446 
transferred to Isabella, . 529 

Nice, truce of, 432 

Nimwegen, treaty of, . . 563 
Nitard, Inquisitor-general, 

560, ^63 
Nobility, the orders of vir- 
tually extinguished, 435 



O'Donnell, . . 

retirement of, 

Olivares, . . . 

Omaiyades, the, 

condition of Spain under 

the, 

Otway's " Venice Pre 

served," . . .■ .. 

Oviedo, foundation of, . 



PAGE 

6SO, 685 
69O 



553 
69 

9^ 

55 2 
14S 



Pacification of Ghent, the, 513 
Paraguay, Jesuit settlement 

in> 595 

Passau, peace of, . . 442 

Pavia, battle of, ... 424 
Peace of religion, the, . . 442 
Pedro, Dom, Emperor of 

Brazil, 406 

Pedro's head, story of, . .221 
Pedro the Ceremonious, 

224, 225 
Pedro the Cruel, of Castile, 215 
Pedro the Great, of Ara- 

gon, 209 

Pel agi us, story of, . . . . .'40 
Perez, Garci de Vargas, . 205 
Perez, Juan, prior of La 

Rabida, 364 

Peru, conquest of, . . . . 392 

customs in, 393 

Phenician navigators, . xxiv 

Philosophy in Spain, . . 112 

Philip of Anjou, .... 565 

Philip II., accession of, . . 455 

character of, . 530, 531, S3 2 

education of, .... . 455 

horrible death of, . . . 530 






714 



Index. 



Philip II., his ambition re 

garding Spain, . . 

his government of Spain 

his policy towards the 

Netherlands, . . . 

life of, 

marriage treaty with Ma 

ry of England, . . 
marries a third time, . 
marries Mary of England, 
private life of, ... . 
proposes marriage to 
Elizabeth of England, 
takes measures to oper- 
ate against England 
travels of, . . . . 
Philip III., reign of, . 
Philip IV., character of, 
Philip V., accession of, 

death of, ... . 
Pinzon,Vincente, discoverer 

of the La Plata, . 
Pirates of Barbary, e 
prise against, . . 
Pizarro, Francisco, . 
siezes the Inca, . . 
Poetry, Arabian, 102, 
in Castile, .... 
in the old navigators 
Poitiers, battle near, 
Pompey and Caesar, . 
Ponce de Leon, discoverer 

of Florida, 
Ponce, Vargas, satire by, 
Popular institutions, . 243 

Population, 

Pragmatic Sanction, the, 

annulled, ...... 652 



105 



538 

469 
45 6 

443 
461 

453 
503 

461 

522 
457 
550 
553 
569 
593 

375 

43 1 
37& 
405 
112 
181 
36r 

xxxii 

375 
616 
244 
xxi 



PAGE 

Pragmatic Sanction, the, 

concurred in by Spain, 592 

Prim, Marshal, assassina- 
tion Of, ; 698 

" Privilegio General," the, 
the Magna Charta of 
Aragon, 209 



Progress, 

under Philip V., . . . 

Pronunciamento, the, of 

Cadiz, .... 694, 

Protestant, the name first 

given, 

Protestantism established, 
martyr-fires of, in Spain, 
in the Netherlands, 
progress of, ... . 
Protestants, hostilities a 

gainst, 

Provence invaded by 

Charles V., ... 
Pueblo, the, of Mexico, . 
Pulgar, Hernan Perez del 
Punic wars 



686 

57- 

6 95 

43° 
442 

467 
465 
468 

437 

4-3 

3S4 

305 

xxx i 



Quadruple Alliance, the, . 667 



Rabida, convent of, . . 
Ramiro, reign of, . . . 
Raymond of Barcelona, 158, 
Recared and Hermenigild, 
Recared's reign, . . . 
Recess of Augsburg, . . 
Reformation, the, in Ger 

many, , 

Reformed doctrines crushed 

out of Spain, . . . 
Reform, seeds of, . . . 



364 
J 5° 
x 59 
33 
36 
444 

41/ 

468 
575 



Index. 



715 



PAGE 

Reform under Ferdinand 
VI. and Charles III., 

577, 578, 580. 584, 585 

Reforms under Narvaez, . 682 

Religion of the Peruvians, . 399 

of the Mexicans, . . . 385 

under the Omaiyades, 

127, 129 
Religious tyranny, ... 67 
Republic proclaimed, . . 699 
Retrogression, ...... 604 

Revolution in Castile, . .421 

the French, 608 

Richelieu, death of, . „ . 558 
Rio Verde, battle of the, . 296 
Rivers of Spain, . . . . xx 
Roderic, fall of, . . . . 139 
Roderic, the " Last of the 

Goths," 50 

Rodrigo of Lara, cruelty of, 190 
Roland at Roncesvalles, . 146 
Romanism, opposition to, . 694 
Romans in Spain, 

xxxi, xxxii, xxxv, xxxvi 

Rome humbled, .... 460 

sacking of, by Constable 

de Bourbon, .... 426 

Roncesvalles, . . . , .146 

Royal statute, the, of 1834, 

665, 666 
Ruins in Spain, . . . xxxix 
Ryswick, peace of, ... 564 

Saguntum, siege of, . . xxviii 

St. James, ..... xxxv 

St. Quentin, siege of, . . 459 

Salamanca, battle of, . . 644 



PAGE 

Salic Law, the, 260 

the, abolished, .... 651 
San Ildefonso, palace of, . 594 

treaty of 614 

Santiago, order of, ... 267 
Saragossa besieged by Char- 
lemagne, ..... 71 
second siege of, . . . . 639 
Satire on Spanish affairs, . 615 
Scholarship, advance in, . 578 
Science, progress of, 572, 575 
Scipio in Spain, . . . xxxi 
Segovia, proclamation of 
Ferdinand and Isabella 



260 
243 



Self-government in Castile 
Selim II. resolves to ac- 
quire Cyprus, .... 494 

Serrano, 699 

lays down his authority, . 695 

regent, 697 

Sertorious, revolt of, . . xxxii 
Seville, conquest of, . . . 205 
Sheep husbandry, . . . . xx 

Sidney, Sir Philip, . . . 523 
Sienna, revolt of, ... . 442 

Sierras, the, ...... xvii 

Slavs, increasing power of, 94 
Smalkalde, League of, . , 431 
Social condition, . . . 60, 98 
Social condition of Spain 
under Ferdinand and 
Isabella, ..... 269 

Social order in Mexico, . . 383 
Social organization among 

the Peruvians, . . 394 

Solyman, movements of, . 431 



716 



Index. 



PAGE 

Solyman the Magnificent 

attacks Rhodes, . . .421 
Soult, Marshal, his expedi- 
tion to Portugal, . . 639 
South America, revolts in, . 646 
Spanish character, . . . 240 
Spain under Philip II., . .501 
Speyer, Diet of, .... 450 
Strabo on the primitive in- 
habitants, .... xxiii 
Succession, war of the, 26 r, 587 
Suevi, downfall of the, . . 34 
Superstition, xx 

Talleyrand, 620 ; 

Taric-ibn-Ziyad, .... 62 
Taxation, heavy, in Spain, 432 

system of, 542 

Taxes increased 551 

Templars, order of, dis- 
solved, 213 

Theodosius the Great, . 18, 21 
Theology among the Ara- 
bians, . . . . . . 106 

Titicaca, island of, . . 400 j 

Toledo, fall of, S4 

Toulouse, kingdom of 

founded, 27 

Tours, battle of, .... 70 
Trafalgar, battle of, . . . 621 
Trent, Council of, . . . . 437 
Trinidad, battle of, . . .614 
Tunis, capture of by Don 

Juan, . 500 

Utrecht, peace of, . . , 591 

treaty of, ..... . 570 , 

union of, ..... . 520 



Valencia, fall of, . , 
Valetta, capital of Malta, 
Vargas Ponce, satire by, 
Vasco de Gama, . . . 
" Venice Preserved," the 

of Otway, .... 
Vergara, treaty of, . . 
Vervins, treaty of, . 
Villaviciosa, battle of, . 
Vincent, St., battle of, . 
•■ Virginius affair," the, . 
Viriates of Lusitania, . 
Visigoths in Spain, . . 
Visigothic system of juri 

prudence, .... 



PAGE 

201 
481 
616 
37i 

552 
674 

5 2 9 
559 
614 
701 
xxxi 
17 

265 



Wamba's reign, . . . 
Wealth, increase of, . . 
Wellesley, Arthur (after 
wards duke of Wei 
lington), .... 
Wellington in Portugal, 

in Spain, , 

William of Orange (the 

Silent), a Calvinist, 

accused by Margaret of 

Parma, 

at Cateau-Cambresis, . 
against the Inquisition, . 

473 
at the head of affairs, 

death of, 

unites Holland and Zea 

land, ...... 

William of Orange, . . 

deatn of, , 

Women at the siege of 

Granada, 



45 

!3° 



643 

638 

476 

469 
460 

474 
520 
521 

5*3 
563 



281 



Index. 



717 



PAGE 

Women, beauty of the An- 

dalusian, 275 

Worms, Diet of, . . . .416 
Worship, limited freedom 

of, 702 

Xeres de la Frontera, bat- 
tle of, 52, 54 

Ximenes, Cardinal, 

327, 333> 346 

character of, 411 

regent, 408 

Ximene the Heroic, . . . 179 

Yousof, king of Morocco, . j86 



PAGE 

Yuste, described 449 

retirement of Charles V. 
to, ... 446, 449, 450 

Zahara, capture of, . . 281 
Zahra. palace of, at Curdo 

va, 120 

Zallaca, battle of 186 

Ziryab becomes a legis 

lator, 

Zumalacarregui, his per 



sonal appearance, 



76 
668 



Tomas, joins Don Carlos, 

66 r, 668 
Zutphen, battle of, ... 523 



an lb 1S48 




LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



llllllllllllllllll 

019 452 479 1 



III 



■m 
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